Lurch and Holler is an utterance of devotion to the Universe and Her maker, as we contemplate the beautiful sadness of the human conditon. We offer this vocal debris in the form of hymns, parables and regressions, with the hope that we and the Listeners will be drawn to gaze upon the moon.
Bret McCabe's City Paper Article reads as follows:
Liz Downing and Michael Willis' latest self-released, self-titled album is and isn't what you've come to adore and expect from this long-running and flabbergastingly fecund local music partnership. Downing's woozily angelic voice can still charm you into bucolic dreaminess with its equally refined and woodsy pipes as if she were a more earth-goddess Patsy Cline. Willis' stolid baritone still provides an uncannily delicate foil to Downing's vocal flights of fancy. The music remains a melting pot of American folk idioms that sounds and feels learned on the front porches and vaudeville halls of average folks across the Southeast. And Downing and Willis still favor the commonplace bizarre in their lyrics, singing about monkeys, men developing monkey paws, monkey heads, how a moth loves a flame until it burns, and hopes and dreams about houses that don't tilt.
What's new over these 12 songs is a beguiling sense of the divine and an unadulterated appreciation of oddity that not even Lambs Eat Ivy, Downing and Willis' prototypical freak-qua-free folk outfit from the early 1990s, achieved. The divine appears in levitating songs whose tone and instrumentation channels the ethereal shimmer of 20th-century American church music. "Vertical Stripes" opens with an organ hum that sounds like the ambient pre-service sound laid down by a little old woman with horn-rim glasses named Ruby; later in the song Downing and Willis interject a heavenly series of harmonies. "Habit" moves along a solitary piano maintaining a devotional pace, over which Downing peels off the sort of acrobatic vocal performance typically confined to a funeral service. The subject matter is a bit unusual--"I do the same thing with my habit that my momma did with hers," Downing sings, and it's not entirely clear if she means nun's habit or not--but she sangs the holy living shit out of it. "I always keep my monkey near to me," she unfurls in the very next line--the song's last, mind you--elongating the "near" over a few seconds as if it were the third syllable in "hallelujah."
The weird reaches even more delicious heights. A banjo and piano duet sketches the skeletal song spine of "Big Head Sleeps," in which Downing levitates a description of a sleeping beast that sounds pulled out of some kid's nightmare. "She Carved a Trench" is the most upbeat and jaunty banjo- and piano-propelled death rattle you've ever heard. And in "Monkey Paw," Downing's intro tale about an Alabama farmer refusing to pay his due to water conjurer Cleopatra bewitchingly recalls nothing shy of the indubitable Ann Magnuson, and the song itself goes on to become this dizzying jungle of an organ-grinder carousel melody and collapsing blues. It's so obstinately outlandish and yet so utterly delightful it might as well be a lost Captain Beefheart track.
by Bret McCabe
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livestream available at wloy.org or 1620AM in Baltimore (near Loyola College)
Request Line 410 617 5346 or AIM WLOYIM and WLOYLive
Shut Up! I’m On the Radio is a weekly show about music from Baltimore and the surrounding area. Basically, if it’s located within two hours of Baltimore we want to know about it.
Please send a CD or CD-R of your music. Please note selected tracks and/or tracks that may not be radio friendly. Feel free to include any press kit you have available. Definitely include information about when and where you will be playing in the Baltimore area.
Shut Up! I’m On the Radio Loyola College WLOY 4501 North Charles Street Baltimore MD 21210
