Seth Augustus “To the Pouring Rain” (Porto Franco Records, 2010)

Blues with heart and beef

I know it is probably my own ignorance about the Blues that leads me to compare everything to Captain Beefheart. For me, ‘Trout Mask Replica’ is one of those records that you can judge people by. I’m willing to bet that Seth Augustus knows his Beefheart the way the Vikings knew the night sky.

It takes something special for a Blues record to be reviewed on this site. If Augustus was a mere copyist I’d be typing bland admonishments about something else. It is true that he does have a voice like the exhausted bark of a fairground Carney, each word seems to hook itself in his oesophagus and needs great effort to expel it. He’s been around for an age too, apprenticing himself to Paul Pena, travelling the world, learning amongst many other things, Tuvan throat singing. It’s a colourful biography, exactly the kind of back story a Bluesman should have.

So far so normal, I’ve still not answered the question as to why he deserves a review. Most of the songs sound like a reflective Beefheart, ‘Slim Sam’ has the kind of ‘squid eating dough in a polyethylene bag is fast and bulbous’ hipster stream of consciousness lyrics with slide guitars grating off the notes in bunches but it’s not that. It’s not the Eastern percussion of ‘Air to the Thrown’ though it does help. It may not even be the Tuvan banjo and throat singing that make ‘Buffalo Eight’ a mixture of poetry and strangeness. Neither is it the Tuvan fiddle that pulls the Blues out of the Delta/Bayou/City and flings it down onto the Steppes on ‘The Tiny Little Head’ which is like the soundtrack to a Brothers Quay film.

No the reason that this one got through is the ‘Trickeries of Great Emptiness’ where a simple drum track, a melancholic vocal, a fricassee of guitar and some slide guitar that’s as graceful as a Kingfisher plucking its prey out of the water. It’s a simple lesson of how to make something good out of so little, Augustus does everything and he’s produced a song of simple elegance.

Date review added:  Wednesday, February 10, 2010
Reviewer:  David Cowling
Reviewers Rating:
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