Knife in the Water
Red River + Sunset Motel (7")
Overcoat Recordings

Lost notes to:
First time through the record... A most thick and visceral hangover, the same color and waxy-width as the Maker's Mark bottle from a post-show gathering at Laura and Aaron's abode. Lying among the scattered droppings of boxes, new records sealed, wadded up tour tees, and sweated laundry skins, trying to make out exactly why Skip James was so glad nearly a hundred years prior.

Or as it was when Fahey found him in a hospital bed. "What took you so motherfuckin' long?"

It's all so hidden under the heavy blankets of crackles, courtesy of the melting red wax of the bottle itself. Psycho Mike was there as well.

It was a painful listen this morn, a straight razor wrapped in pretty paper.

"A mature work."

I stood, wavered, and whispered on Emo's strewn floor, or even splayed across grey carpet, with flea-bites, stretch marks, notorious scar tissue patterns. Either action is overwhelming, and the utterance about maturity, as in older, yes, but also it enters as burdened and slowed, staggering through a river so thick and garnet red, rocks jutting, a bloody bludgeon blood pulling down the wrinkled hand, the corners of the weary face...

(towards darker ruts)

The band is fleshed out though. Bill's steel swells or bellows, sometimes as sweet or rolling as dew or a bell.

Cisco can brush like swaying wheat or crackle and snap, as burning as a fire.

Laura, more than swell or belle, towards Nancy Sinatra even, but organ and backing "baum baums", not unlike a Patsy Cline pop. Aaron Blount... (pages are burnt, streaked)

There are nights where clouds stir and the songs spin faster ("Party at the Open Wound", "Sundown, Sundown"), but here they slow in the river, current almost comatose from pills, drink, yet yearning through the dark black molasses of that morose feeling that sticks so. The record, hurts, black.

When the songs do rock ("Rene", "Young Blood in the River") the sound is deceptive; the fast parts flash like switchblades, churn all stripped down, blurry and intense, but hollow. Only a guitar and snare.

...wiry with hungering... "and flying, but head first into the headlights of the highway, thrown through the windshield" ...Snarling low along the opened ground...

...as birdbones or carcass ribs, armadillo shells, leprosy. And the birds are still here, nightingales, chickens, crows grotesque and blackened. As well as topless dancers, pills, and a Nevada Spider. Fuck, the pills are coming up through the bloodstream.

The Jordannaires, dizzy from blood loss!

Copyright © 2001 Andy Beta