Goth Rock Without the Freak Show

Sunday News
Published:
By JOHN DUFFY, Correspondent

Young rock groups almost always claim originality. They happily list the bands who've influenced them - sure to drop a few names no one's heard of - and then insist they don't sound like anyone else. More often than not, that kind of hubris spells doom. These are the bands destined to remain unlauded nobodies. Rare is the truly peerless artist, though there are some. Take, for instance, Murder by Death.

Their songs about treachery, drunkenness, prison breaks, executions and strained family loyalty recall the cautionary tales of folk music, blues and gospel with a decidedly morose undertone. Sarah Balliet's brooding cello recalls Victorian parlor music, and in her hands a modern digital keyboard can sound like a calliope or a church organ. Drummer Alex Schrodt plays with a downbeat-heavy rockabilly snap, and bassist Matt Armstrong sounds positively industrial.

Lead singer Adam Turla's voice is pure Midwestern baritone, perfect for songs that explore the dark nature of humankind and the forces that drive people down. In their own way, Murder by Death has reinvented goth rock. The band has wrested gothic away from the fishnet-and-nail-polish crowd and placed it squarely back on a dusty bookshelf beside a stash of old 78-rpm blues records and a ghostly graveyard of sepia-tone photographs.

"None of us had even done anything seriously in music before," Turla said during the band's recent stopover at Lancaster's Chameleon Club. "We just started playing together, and all of us had different musical styles we were into. "It came out sounding kind of odd, but we've been on the road with it for six years. ... We kind of tend to stand out a bit. That has helped us on tours where we didn't necessarily fit in."

Murder by Death returns to the Chameleon Friday night in support of Reverend Horton Heat. The band formed in, of all places, Bloomington, Ind., in 2000. Its first full-length album, "Like the Exorcist, But More Breakdancing," was followed by the far more serious sounding "Who Will Survive and What Will Be Left of Them?" about the Devil attacking a Mexican village but finally dying in a bar fight.

The band members have set songs to montages of World War I footage to chilling effect, and they court the imagery of frontier America through photographs and other design elements like no group since the Band. Their latest album, "In Bocca a Lupo," focuses on succinct stories, a collection of narratives about people living on the razor's edge between good and evil.

Sometimes they can't tell where that line is, or just don't care. The album gives little hint that the band, for all its cinematic weirdness and darkness, is actually made up of pretty normal and well- adjusted people. "We tried playing more normal songs at first, but this just seemed more fun," Balliet said. "We used to be more serious and play the role, but we've gotten to the point where it's okay if we smile onstage. We're having fun."

As an English/religious studies dual major at Indiana University, Turla became fascinated with the idea that good and evil were not always so clear cut. Studying Buddhism and Taoism alongside Herman Mellville, Gabriel Garcia Marquez and William Faulkner can do that to you. The band's latest batch of songs attempts to trace that blurry moral line.

In "Brother," a man bemoans his brother's drunken, thieving ways - acts of selfishness that bring havoc and pain to those who love him: "Johnny Law keeps pounding at my door/ 'Cause you [messed] up some new score." Yet as much as the man hates his brother's lifestyle, in the end, when the police come around, he swears, "They can knock all of my doors down, but I won't say a word."

"I have had a lot of people come up to me and say they really relate to that song," Turla said. "It's a very real song to some people, and that's very different for us." In the haunting "Shiola," a man grieves for a family he never had, or lost, or pushed away, or has invented in his mind to ease his loneliness. In "Sometimes the Line Walks You," a man languishes in prison for crimes to which he happily confesses, yet the song evokes sympathy for the criminal.

And consider the man in "The Big Sleep" who gives parting instructions to his wife as he is led to the gallows. He prays for forgiveness, yet tells his wife where to find a buried box of money "of which I never earned a dime/Use it to start over the way things should have been." "I think sometimes people are quick to judge when someone has broken the law," Turla said. "[They] want the harshest sentence. But when it is someone they love, it's a different story."

Taken as a whole, the album comes off as a real downer, but in the album's final moments, Turla and company find a glimmer of hope. After ruminating on the wickedness and pettiness of the human race in "The Devil Drives," a gospel song comes out of nowhere. "There's still time to start again" the song repeats over and over, building to a joyous refrain. It's the only segment of the album that isn't in a minor key, so the relief is almost ecstatic, downright Pentecostal by rock 'n' roll standards.

"That was a fragment of another song that we added. I was unsure of it," Turla said, "but everyone in the band thought it was a good idea. It's nice to end things, I think, on a hopeful note. "The album is a bit of a journey through all of these people's lives and their conflicts. But at any time, someone can decide to do what is right, to turn things around."