The Builders and The Butchers are back with their third effort, Dead Reckoning, and it picks up where Salvation Is A Deep Well left off. I recently described B&B as a blend between the ambitious lyrical content of The Decemberists with the dark gothic folky feel of O’Death. Dead Reckoning was recorded live in eight days with no overdubs and, other than a couple of violin parts, the boys played every last instrument on the album.
The setup and process seems to agree with them as the album has a very loose feel. A meaty stew of blues, folk, and gothic gospel (or as I like to call it – “gothpel”), the Portland-based outfit continue to churn out albums rich in vision. Lead singer Ryan Sollee:
Like our previous records, the settings of the songs follow a few main ideas: the father and the son, early 1900s America, absolute good and evil, addiction, and religion. On this album, I really thought a lot about the end of the world and the dark times we live in, how the feelings we feel and the world we experience is not that different from 1930s America, and I thought about the music that was created at that time. This is where the inspiration for these songs originated.
Their sound takes you to the turn of the century – a band of gypsies traveling town to town playing in a tent revival show, fronted by Sollee as some sort of warped preacher. “All Away,” a song without any percussion, would be the perfect benediction as you exit the tent. It’s only Sollee singing over an acoustic arrangement and it’s gorgeous in its dark, foreboding way. On Dead Reckoning, The Builders and The Butchers continue to carve out a genre defying niche. And for that I am thankful.
The Builders and The Butchers recently premiered their first music video for “Golden And Green” at Spinner. Their latest album, Salvation Is A Deep Dark Well, is slowly becoming one of my favorites of ’09. You can catch them at Lollapalooza.
The Builders and The Butchers are back, so let’s start with some lyrics:
Close your eyes and you draw one more day to a close.
You choose to be alone. You float through your life as a ghost.
And everything heals given time. And everything dies given time.
And the scars run together, mixing the nerves with the blood.
And the soldiers light houses on fire and they burn down.
And all your belongings turn to dirt in the ground.
When your heart’s deep and dark as a well.
And everything that’s golden and green goes to hell.
And away we go kids, for another uplifting collection of tunes from Portland’s The Builders And The Butchers. The thing that initially drew me to B&B on their self-titled debut is how their storytelling transplants you to another place. Tunes likes “Bottom Of The Lake” and “Red Dresses” made me an immediate fan. As evident by the initial verse of “Golden And Green” shown above, Salvation Is A Deep Dark Well sees the boys moving forward with their bluegrass/punk music.
The Builders and Butchers are built around vocalist Ryan Sollee’s Southern-Gothic inspired lyrics backed by a host of instruments, including mandolin, pump organ, violin, stand-up bass, keys and whatever else they could find to bang on or slap together.‚ They revisit the Spanish Civil War on “Barcelona,” a song that features an excellent dose of trumpet that offsets the tension in Ryan’s vocals. It’s a brilliant composition and sign of the band’s progress. “In The Branches” is another winner that features a choir down the stretch, giving it a gospel vibe.
The music blends gospel, country, folk in a bouillabaisse of noise and sound that leaves you on edge, but wholly satisfied. Their bio has this to say about Salvation and I couldn’t have worded it any better: “The story of Salvation is a Deep Dark Well is that there’s joy and celebration through the darkness, there’s light in the hardest of times, and when you reach the bottom may salvation light your way.”
