The Builders And The Butchers - The Funeral Band

To grant yourself the chance of true spiritual peace, you must have experienced the abyss at least once in your life. Fair enough, put in these terms it sounds like the most worn-out of clichés about redemption. The real news today, the truly astonishing thing about this old adage, is that there's still someone out there willing to use it to fuel their creativity and stir real emotion. The parallel between bliss and damnation has always fascinated Americans, and many pages of their popular culture have been written leaning on this convenient device. Salvation is a deep, dark well. That's the unwavering conviction of up-and-coming act The Builders And The Butchers, a band so enamored of dichotomies that they made one into their very name. The preference for contrasts and chiaroscuro is much more than a mere stylistic signature in the story of this promising outfit from the alternative underground: it becomes the reflection of a personal upward arc, a search for one's own place in the world. The story, emblematic and still unfinished, tells of an escape from Alaska toward the city best suited to their restless sensibility (the usual blessed Portland, Oregon), following nearly the same route traveled at almost the same time by Portugal The Man. For five unlikely hopefuls, the moment of the thaw arrived. Until yesterday, these musicians' encyclopedia held no entries beyond "punk" and "rock"; then the young men discovered, in the virtual attic of their new home, trunk after trunk of roots music - Americana with a capital A, gospel, authentic, down-and-out blues - and a chasm of pure ecstasy opened up before them.

Flirting with the devil…

Coming from remote Anchorage, Ryan Sollee brought very little with him. Just the essentials to keep himself going before finding a job, the hunger of someone who still has everything to prove, and then, well, naturally that handful of old friends, bandmates in a group with a not exactly thrilling name, Born Losers, which is promptly scrapped. Portland in 2004 is a musically vibrant city, so the red-haired singer and guitarist has no trouble meeting people who share his passion, several of them, like him, from Alaska. They form the embryonic core of a new outfit, provisionally named The Funeral Band. On Halloween night 2005, the group plays its first show in a Southern-rock vein under the name The Builders And The Butchers, already steeped in gothic inflections and performed at first without amplification, which soon became necessary given the unexpectedly packed crowd. One of their distinctive traits, evident right away, is the presence of a double-drum lineup — or rather, a deconstructed drum kit, with Paul Seely on bass drum and Ray Rude on snares coexisting in harmony. The creative process is equally original, starting with the lyrics (written solely by the frontman) which are then brought to the rest of the band to work out the music together. The local label Bladen County takes notice and signs them before long. The first year goes by in a string of street performances, often held outside clubs where already established artists are playing. Among the first to take notice are Man Man, who recognize a certain kinship and don't hesitate to invite them to open some of their shows the following year, and Loch Lomond, one of the most significant names in the city's rising chamber-folk scene: the two bands will release an eight-track split in the summer of 2007.

For a couple of years the guys write songs and play them like madmen, wearing out the instruments they brought from the north as their only baggage. Then, still in 2007, the time is ripe for their recorded debut. With the eponymous The Builders And The Butchers, our heroes put together a debut that plays out like a long gospel exorcism, feverish and pleading, starting from the a cappella intro of "The Night Pt. 1", backed only by the varied clutter of their rhythmic arsenal.

The band's fiery, roiling style soon shows its hand with the impetuous expressionist country of "Red Hands" and its monumental acoustic framework: Sollee's possessed voice is utterly overwhelmed by the percussion setup and the relentless strumming of the guitars. It's a collection of vibrant songs, intermittently set ablaze by Harvey Tumbleson's mandolin, the two drummers' unfussy brushwork, and the singer's over-the-top delivery, effective in its theatrical flourishes but smart enough to avoid straying from a genuinely coherent roots rock, wonderfully rough and iron-tinged.

The twilight Chicano tones evoked right from the title of "Spanish Death Song" then ignite into a formidable showpiece, the best song the Decemberists still haven't written: rousing, choral, infectious and decadent, yet without tipping into a gaudy Robert Rodriguez-style cartoon, and thorough enough in laying out the key traits of an aesthetic to sound both programmatic and paradigmatic at once. The production is perhaps still a touch rustic and rough around the edges, partly curbing the band's explosiveness, but the backbone of their expressive signature already comes through clearly. The frontman takes command with real personality on the following "Black Dresses", showing the venomous character of a lineup still uncontaminated as few are, sharp, relentless, skilled at reviving a Nineties roots-rock formula — from Sixteen Horsepower to the dustier Grant Lee Buffalo — in a way that, all things considered, is anything but predictable. There's no shortage of looser, tipsier, stumbling passages either, a personal take on the Dylanesque gospel, as in "The Gallows", which has the feel of a country fair.

The record's palette of colors and shades is still limited to a narrow range, with an obvious abundance of chiaroscuro. Sollee, in any case, makes up for this limitation with his evident skill in shifting gears and in the unpredictability of his contrasts, with some fine bursts of plain-spoken lyricism, as in "Slowed Down Trip To Hell", already equipped with a biting magnetism, a deeply Yankee energy that seems to trace back as far as the voices of Delta slaves, or of Leadbelly ("The Night Pt. 2"). The raw tone is never set aside, even though on the second side the record seems to favor spiritual colorings over sheer impetuosity. It's this that allows the Portland quintet to avoid turning their effort into a mere exercise or too raw an outpouring of a single idea, managing instead, right at the close, to light up the album with a track that betrays an unusual lightness, a grace that might not be conventional, might be provincial, but still works as a welcome gust of fresh air (without ever disavowing an intensity that's always above average). The band still shows itself to be thoughtfully restrained and tries not to overplay stylistic traits that are already quite distinctive on their own. That restraint is one of the merits of The Builders And The Butchers, since it reveals a desire not to burn through promising potential right out of the gate, and the little gem "Bringing Home The Rain", with the band indulging in moods worthy of the more meditative Felice Brothers, sets the standard in that regard.

To really land the knockout blow, though, they still lack a "strong" project, one with sure-fire appeal in terms of themes and imagery. But on that front, as on the technical side, The Builders & The Butchers won't take long to fine-tune their aim to good effect. Over the following two years they make a name for themselves locally thanks to a series of utterly gripping performances (supporting Dax Riggs, Helio Sequence and Port O'Brien) but seem destined to remain in the shadows, like so many others. The first piece of their personal stroke of luck has the face of Chris Funk, guitarist of the Decemberists, who moonlights as a talent scout and producer. The offer of help is too good to turn down, and it comes with access to top-tier studios, gear and collaborators (including Tucker Martine), a windfall none of the Builders could have imagined even a couple of months earlier.

This is where the chapter of Salvation Is A Deep Dark Well effectively opens, a thrilling sophomore effort and a potential winning ticket for yet another irresistible Portland-made outfit. Meeting them for the first time, an inattentive ear or eye might mistake the five bearded Americans for the millionth gang of singer-songwriter-folksters, the kind that have sprung up like mushrooms in the North American indie underbrush (Canadian too, then) over a night that's lasted half a decade. The irrepressible urgency of these makeshift underground migrants would, however, be enough on its own to clear up any misunderstanding, especially those superficial impressions dictated by the instrumentation and look hastily adopted by musicians fleeing the cold of their adolescence. Marked by an unquestionable coherence of sound and songwriting, steeped in an updated Baptist rhetoric that reinforces its impact, the album takes on the shape of an unusual concept piece, often described (with absurd inadequacy) as "gothic", a parallel journey into the heart of the Manichaeism so dear to popular America (here the term American Gothic proves surprisingly fitting) and into the musical identity of that very same world, somewhere between a past that feels newly relevant today and a collection of postcards stamped with the frontier's pocket-sized mythology.

The exploration starts from the darkness of "Golden And Green", with what feels very much like a premise. The invitation to close your eyes encourages identification with the protagonist of the whole story, even though in an interview Sollee has said he drew inspiration for this song from one of the most extraordinary idiot savants in art history, Henry Darger (who has already influenced a host of artists, from Natalie Merchant to Sufjan Stevens, from Vivian Girls to Animal Collective, from Majical Cloudz to Comet Gain, by way of Wussy). Impetuous and striking, the opening track sets out the emotional and sonic lines of the album, with Ryan's quavering voice bursting in and taking charge alongside the heavy artillery of the two drummers, the violins and guitars of every kind. The prompt reinforcement offered by the rough-hewn "Devil Town", immediate yet attentive to detail with its rustic, band-like physiognomy (made fruitful by songwriting that's up to the task), consolidates the sense of being in the presence of a machine built to impress, in which every element does its job to perfection. Behind the console, Funk and Martine show they know how to instill that sense of magical balance these guys evidently lacked, smoothing and rounding off the sound compared to the folk roughness of that first record, but without blunting its edge — if anything, nurturing the potential of a band of pure substance, already special in its own right. A truly well-matched partnership, then, rediscovering the most incendiary roots music of the past century.

Introduced by banjo and harmonica, "Short Way Home" is an explosion of color and iron-tinged moods — with atmospheres leaning toward the raw and bluesy — dominated by Sollee's nasal, histrionic voice. A tight set of images built around golden wings, angels, dark tombs, blood, rivers and trees in flames is laid out with just the right conviction in lyrics loaded with millenarian suggestions. The devil carves out a starring role (how could it be otherwise) as the dark half of the human soul, while fire blazes everywhere emotions explode. The Spanish-flavored detour staged by the hyperbolic "Barcelona" coincides with the moment the band's debt to the Decemberists' style surfaces in full view (does "O Valencia" ring a bell?), perhaps with a touch too much Meloy-isms in the vocals. The band's genuinely emphatic streak and authentic warmth nonetheless save the track from feeling like a cheap imitation or picaresque theatrics, turning it instead into an irresistible tribute, almost a personal reinterpretation of the classicism of a band that has by now truly arrived.

Buoyed by such a forceful and decisive start, the Builders allow themselves the luxury of landing a few more striking blows right away, just for the pleasure of surprising the listener without overhauling their blatantly expressionist game. With the razor-sharp "Hands Like Roots" they feign a throwaway filler track while actually delivering one of the album's most successful experiments: a radical reworking of country's typical mechanisms and stylistic devices, tempered by the rock-solid compactness of a multi-dimensional sound and a deliberately uneven gait. "Down In The Hole" and "Raise Up Your Weary Hands" aim for a more delicate dress, scaling back the heavy artillery's contributions (still crucial, though, as an energizing device, especially on the refrains), freeing Harvey Tumbleson's excellent mandolin — a true signature of the five-piece's sound — from simple grunt-work duty and catching everyone a bit off guard with the western/Chicano recoding of the catchiest of hooks (“When you make fire with the devil/ Don’t be surprised if you get burned/ You were among the lucky ones/ And he only took your hands”). Before the end there's still time to set the powder alight. "Vampire Lake" and "In The Branches" go straight to the top of the record's most frantic, thunderous tracks, with the usual uproar of the rhythm section organized with disciplined fury and a fine stock of restless violins (on the first) to balance the structure with the pure language of the heart.

Set between the two, "The Wind Has Come" again opts for a strategy of Decemberists-like mimicry, fearlessly exposing itself to the risk of stylization and formula. Its labored pace and a sound design devoted to utmost restraint make it an almost alien, estranging passage, an island of exhausted melancholy amid the headlong rush of the other songs. But the energy, masterfully held back here, is enough to fully confirm the band's credentials, proving their confident authority even when handling registers not exactly standard for the Portland-based outfit. "The World Is A Top" works beautifully as the conclusion of the arc, the climb out of the well to see the stars again. The peak is reached with an electroacoustic outpouring that's flawless in terms of emotional release, with fitting lo-fi gospel colorings widening the expressive range of Salvation Is A Deep Dark Well (dusting off one of the dazzling formulas of their wonderful debut). Once again, in that order of ideas, out of the void of silence, the Builders' strength comes through enormously amplified. A bet won on every level, then, both band and album passing with flying colors.

An easily foreseeable course

The band, meanwhile, doesn't rest on its, however modest, laurels and appears to be in full evolution. It smoothly weathers a couple of lineup changes, with drummer Brandon Hafer and bassist Willy Kunkle coming in to replace the departing Paul Seely and Alex Ellis, then sets off on a new promotional tour alongside the likes of Amanda Palmer, Heartless Bastards, Brand New and Murder By Death. To capture the energy of their shows without any filter, the five decide to work with Adam Selzer (Decemberists, M. Ward, She & Him) and Dylan Magierek (Mark Kozelek), recording the new songs live in the studio over the course of a week and keeping overdubs and post-production to a minimum. The only guest is their violinist friend Amanda Lawrence. The title of the new record, Dead Reckoning, which refers to the old navigational technique of estimated position, also works as a nod to the band's own, essentially foreseeable, stylistic path, in a record that is deliberately transitional.

Right from the opening "I Broke The Vein", the record sets out to renew the winning formula of its predecessors, showing a talent that, if anything, has grown even sharper in the dynamic handling of fullness and emptiness, shadows and blazing openings, pauses and well-timed accelerations. The band sounds as powerful as ever but capable of sensational control, essentially reaffirming across the board a proudly vintage instrumental setup alongside their usual feverish drive. Much more than in the past, amid the electroacoustic string-instrument mayhem, organ flourishes and, at times, accordions come to the fore. The quintet keeps pushing forward with its fierce reworkings of Americana, replaying with endless variations on the theme the familiar, boldly colored parade of clichés with their well-worn religious or moralizing inflections, references to an ancestral America or to the dark prophets of the Great Depression years: a repertoire fished out of a genuine cultural attic, dusted off and brought up to date with just the right emphasis.

With "It Came From The Sea", the Decemberists return – more in the vein of "Castaways And Cutouts" than the more obvious "Picaresque" or "Her Majesty" – here channeled with unusual grace by a Sollee ever happily inclined toward brazen lyricism and a theatricality that's romantic to the point of excess. The lullaby "Lullaby" tries to make its own not only the lesson of the usual Meloy, but also that of Arcade Fire, Okkervil River and the like. The sense of 'already heard' remains plain, yet everything flows beautifully and the band never slips in intensity, even when handling less wound-up episodes arranged with meticulous care. The weaves have grown slighter, less crushed by the looming rhythm section, which still looms large in the sonic economy of the Portland outfit. That's true of "Moon Is On The March" and, even more so, of "All Away", a passage stripped down almost to a melancholy nakedness of undeniable substance. And it's true of "Out Of The Mountain", which carves out space for contemplation, for the superb nuances of a country-blues ballad, for the slow, wonder-filled gait of a Chris Robinson. The Builders & The Butchers may sound unadorned, but never fragile, never truly defenseless. The fiery side isn't long in coming either ("Cradle On Fire"), igniting with the necessary virulence the rounded, by-the-pound folk stylings of the Americans.

So this new effort even gains some ground on the purely technical side and in terms of songwriting, but pays a toll in visceral impact. Dead Reckoning comes across as a more written, more deliberate, better-dressed record, with a compromise between mind and heart that's ultimately precious. The band fully confirms its genuine roots fragrance, that hot-blooded, pointed temperament perfect for dramatizing a storyline rather limited in invention, indeed stuck at square one. But behind the usual, mighty delivery, behind the surging verve, the trick may be starting to show its age, even without descending into the mannerism of so many peers who've already made it big. "Blood For You", a scaled-down gospel exorcism revisited, has run out of innovative drive to still surprise or to rise above the unremarkable threshold of mere filler. As an invocation, the knowing (and self-satisfied) close of "Family Tree" fares better, the blessing and curse of a stylistic mold doomed to fail any attempt at evolution, its inevitable, classy entertainment now a given – harsh and polished at once – revealing clear debts to other, more fortunate musicians (Black Keys above all, at least judging by the aromatic rock of "Black Elevator").

2011 brings the Builders yet another change in one of their two drummer slots, with Justin Baier replacing Brandon Hafer, but it's also the year of a new shared EP, this time with their friends in Indiana's Murder By Death, a minor cult act in the States. The two bands trade the courtesy of covering each other, alongside two more tracks from their respective catalogs reworked by Ray Rude's solo project, Operation Mission. The result, however, falls short of expectations.

Another two years go by. Anyone who first got to know them when their sophomore record came out, the near-masterpiece Salvation Is A Deep Dark Well, in all likelihood fell head over heels, won over by the terse biographical notes recounting their sudden flight to the mecca of Portland and persuaded by the soundness of that formula, halfway between roots rock, gospel embittered by well-worn Baptist rhetoric, and incendiary alt-country. They probably wouldn't have hesitated for a second to bet their last nickel on this band's name. With hindsight, that would have proven a gamble with no real future. Four years (and two albums) on from that peak, here come The Builders & The Butchers again with Western Medicine, as harsh and theatrical as ever, but without the burning propulsive force they'd once managed to summon in that particular, magic moment.

"Dirt In The Ground", for instance, keeps intact the rush of their rampaging American Gothic filtered through folk, and still proves contagious, despite a penetrating sense of déjà vu. From the devilish, country-fair blues of "Redemption Sound", which once again draws on a store of allegories (mostly religious) as basic as they are effective, to the sense of looming calamity sketched out by the mighty rhythms (the double drum kit has never stopped being one of the band's trademarks) or by the vivid acoustic colorings – all straight out of the usual playbook – in "Desert On Fire", the five Americans dust off, with no substantial novelty, the same Manichean outlook and preacher's verve already on display on previous occasions (no exception made for the immediate predecessor, Dead Reckoning, or for the 2007 eponymous debut), complete with the usual corollary of devils, damnation and fire blazing on every side, entrusted as ever to lyrics that are far too fanciful.

On this new effort, the tension stays vibrant, the sound warm and enveloping, as every space is saturated by the collective's overflowing fullness, even on seemingly less dense tracks. The Builders have lost something in terms of dynamism and drive, but on the lyrical side they remain intense and sufficiently inspired. Ryan Sollee's powerful, solemn, nasal voice is still worth half the record on its own, but the sturdy instrumental set-up, taken as a whole, provides it with an extraordinary frame. From this point of view, the Alaskan boys may have even grown, although their fervent expressionist bent can only limit their appeal to a wider audience.

Despite the hot-blooded atmospheres hovering between picaresque country and Delta blues (a curious meeting point between their putative fathers the Decemberists, fellow countrymen Portugal The Man, and the Felice Brothers), theirs remains genre music, quite limited in terms of viable variations, also given their admirable reluctance to cheapen their own signature with out-of-place contaminations or synthetic tricks. The big limitation of such a peculiar style lies in the impossibility of opening it up to meaningful evolution without irreparably compromising it: so the Builders seem enslaved to their own eccentricity, champions of a tiny kingdom destined never to grow.

The Morricone-esque western evoked by the press notes is, naturally, absorbed and reworked according to the band's own temperament and the galloping emphasis of the record. Fervor, kept at a consistently high level as always, compensates for the inevitable dips in the writing, while instinct easily takes over. The mood, however, never shifts even half a degree, so one ends up appreciating a flawless but hard-to-digest work, one that demands of the listener just the right frame of mind and a good deal of patience. Raising the difficulty level further is the album's considerable length: a few significant cuts and greater nimbleness within individual tracks would have helped, but there's no denying the Americans can't be faulted for stinginess. The obsessive choral chant of "Poison Water" alone is enough to highlight the full determination of the Portland five, their proverbial emotional staying power, and the force of a deliberately dated, analog, handmade sound that's also thunderously visceral.

In a slightly less bulimic, less overflowing guise, the band reveals all its explosive potential, even while staying within the confines of its own territory. The pained but restrained tone of "No Roses" is enough on its own, with its measured, skillful use of piano and guitars plus a truly memorable refrain, to recapture the compelling humanity of Colin Meloy's outfit, back when it didn't yet sound poisoned by formula. Or there's the banjo steering the razor-sharp "Ceceil", a fragile ballad finally stripped of so much ornamentation, before "Take Me Home" opens the finale onto a calmer contemplation after a glut of nightmares, dark clouds and biblical plagues. The pronounced Southern inflection brings back the wholesome, virtuous solidity of the land, of tradition, while Harvey Tumbleson's mandolin smooths the rough edges and softens things, closely followed by the luminous Hammond organ and the voice of a class performer like Sollee.

A difficult record, in short, but still a quality one, from a band that's in its own way remarkable, destined never to break through.

Ride the wave of great music

Add OndaRock to your favorite sources on Google Discover. Don't miss our reviews, milestones and latest news straight in your feed.

Follow on Google