I imagine that like many folks who visit Ave Noctum, I would not describe myself as much of a Country music fan. The main reason is that the majority of music given that title that the public gets exposed to as a whole tends to be the cliché ridden and rhinestone clad bilge inanely spewed out by the likes of Garth Brooks and their ilk, with the darker and more traditional roots of the sound being buried under a tsunami of gun toting and truck worshipping rubbish. If, however, you are willing to look beyond the fireworks and flag waving, there are some dark treasures to be found, and Dee Calhoun presents one such gem with his new album ‘Old Scratch Comes to Appalachia.’

Opening the proceedings is ‘The Day The Rats Came To Town’, the music being delivered care of simple handheld percussion and home-made instruments like cigar box banjos and shovel guitars, Mr Calhoun and his musical cohorts wringing a bleakness from their chosen tools that perfectly matches his howled tale of human downfall. There is no let-up in the gloom with ‘ Verachte Diese Hure’, driven forward by a near hypnotic twanging rhythm, a contrast to the delicate guitar strumming of ‘A Wish In The Darkness’ where Mr Calhoun channels his inner Neil Young, demonstrating that he can not only play but sing with a subtlety that almost belies his moniker of “Screaming Dee”. This same folk rock troubadour sensibility continues with the harmonica heavy ‘New Modern World’, a track that could easily be imagined as a Crazy Horse cover.

The mesmeric nature of the album continues with ‘Conjured’, ‘Pulse’ and ‘Self-Inflicted’, the deceptively simple structure of the music of each track drawing the listener deeper into the world of Dee Calhoun’s stories, the opening thump of ‘Stand With Me’ shaking the audience awake before delivering a soothing chant, the almost dreamlike delivery being underscored with a creeping menace, a theme that runs through every track. Nowhere is this peril more obvious than in album closer and title track ‘Old Scratch Comes To Appalachia’, the Devil arriving by train to sow death and destruction and reap the souls of the damned.

When writing this review, a couple of quotes kept on coming to mind. The first is from the banner of this very site, namely it is “for extreme and atmospheric music”; the second is from the late, great Lemmy Kilmister, “I can remember before there was rock and roll.” ‘Old Scratch Comes To Appalachia’ is an album that proves you don’t need wailing amps on overdrive and corpse painted unintelligible growlers to bring darkness to music, drawing as it does on a tradition of country and folk to tell cautionary tales by firelight, and Dee Calhoun could as easily be a jongleur from days of yore as the stalwart of Doom that he is today.

(8.5/10 Spenny)

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https://screamingmaddee.bandcamp.com/album/old-scratch-comes-to-appalachia