Album Notes

Spoon River songs spring from a sense of the
world’s vast amoral blankness and are shot
through with a pseudo biblical warning
of the persistent evil present in everyday
things. The songs paint a landscape that
is populated by the cruel, the befuddled,
the destitute and the forlorn. They drum
forth a sense of the terror and grandeur of
human existence invoking both fear and
longing. The words illustrate and accentuate
the tensions of which we are daily subjects:
modernity and timelessness, simplicity and
complexity, gravity and absurdity.
Three and four part harmonies, thick slabs of Hammond organ, and an insistent
licking at the guitar, are all belted together by the far off tinkle of piano and
wail of harmonica. They give nods to The Band, doom-trilogy era Neil Young,
and American recordings of Johnny Cash in evoking dirt roads and tall pines.
Listen to it explode like fisticuffs under a drunken orange moon on their debut
album Kingdom of the Burned out now on Northern Electric