Review: Verdin Brothers’ “The Crooked Serpent” | Local Release Show
I listened to Verdin Brothers’ latest record The Crooked Serpent all the way through yesterday afternoon. When I started jaunty folk opener “Lark in the Morning; DuBois’ Folly” the sun was shining high and as the (digital bonus) final track played the light was mostly extinguished behind the trees of the forest by where I live. I feel that juxtaposition of light and dark greatly in Verdin Brothers’ music and especially so in their latest work.
For all their occult symbolism, skeleton imagery, and rustic arcana, the brothers’ music isn’t as shrouded in darkness as one might think. The Crooked Serpent starts on a relatively bright note that’s only mildly tempered by the mellow fingerpicked folk circuit “The Wind in the Eaves.” While not excessively cheery, Primitive folk/blues tunes like “The Trepanned Head” and “Planxty Longfellow” feel warm and inviting. Where things start to take a detour is that both tunes feature an eerie coda that sounds like a fragment of long lost (and definitely haunted) early delta blues.
This glimpses of dark are embraced further in the ghostly ragtime “New Grimalkin Rag,” drone-accented “Equinox,” and in elements of rambling opus “Taller Than The Mountains, Deeper Than The Seas; Tears For Jericho; Our Broken Strings Still Sing” which closes the (digital version of the) record out in a haze of folk, blues, field recordings, and tape hiss.
As a whole The Crooked Serpent is well balanced, an expertly played collection of psychedelic folk and blues that plays both in the sunlight and the shadows. Never more so (at least for me anyway) than album standouts “Where the Sun Goes to Bed (The Skeleton Song)” and “Leviathan.” The former starts sounding like an Alan Lomax field recording before picking up into a lively frolic. The longer you listen the weirder things get. Is that saxophone I hear? Murmurs of field recordings? The latter is a blaze of noise and strings that takes an Appalachian folk palette and warps it into something demonic.
Running through all of The Crooked Serpent is a ghost – another separately recorded epic the Brothers call “The Great Work” that has been paired into the recording. Throughout the album it’s tough to differentiate the two and easy to imagine some of the stranger elements of the record as phantom artifacts from the record’s stillborn twin, like static on a vhs recording that has been recorded over too many times.
Light or dark, ghostly or terrestrial, The Crooked Serpent is here in corporeal form now via Debacle Records. The Verdin Brothers will play a local release show on 11/5 at the Acadia (details). I highly recommend you check out both and assume you can pick up one of the 100 vinyl pressings at the show.
Purchase/stream The Crooked Serpent
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