For Vandaveer's fourth studio album, the Washington DC by-way-of-Kentucky band present a selection of ghostly Americana, mostly songs which are old enough to be in the public domain.
All the tunes document lives cut short by suicide and neglect or through crimes of misdirected passion.
Listening to murder ballads may not be the best way to spend a hot, summer afternoon but perhaps there is some kind of synchronicity as I get the notion some of these malevolent songs were conceived on the kind of sultry days that test your patience and cause tempers to fray.
One thing is sure, these misogynistic staples of the 'old weird America' remain as strange and disturbing as ever.
The victims in Omie Wise,Banks of the Ohio,Down In The Willow Garden and Knoxville Girl are all young women who are brutally murdered and then tossed into the river.
The reasoning of the killers in each case runs along the lines that: if I can't love her then no-one else will. The cold-blooded nature of these deeds is what give them an eerie modernity.
This is a musical journey that begins with Harry Smith's Anthology of American Folk Music and has been traced by a range of diverse artists like The Louvin Brothers, Nick Cave, Johnny Cash, Dock Boggs, Doc Watson, Tom Waits and even Art Garfunkel.
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There are many ways to approach this type of grim material. On the whole, Vandaveer take a relatively conventional line, preferring to focus on the sweet, country melodies rather than emphasise the dark, gothic melodrama.
The drawback of this is that it tends to weaken the impact of the morbid and, at times, sadistic slant to the songs. For example, you lose the relish of a killer as he gloats over the corpse of Henry Lee, saying "lie there till the flesh drops from your bones".
Although the renditions by the core duo of Mark Charles Heidinger and Rose Guerin are not the best you will hear, the cool thing about this record is that it serves as a springboard to seek out other great versions of these tunes.
They may be about death but these songs are very much alive.
Vandaveer's website
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