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Category: Writing and Poetry
 The great German thinker Friedrich Nietzsche believed that music wasthe only vehicle with enough horsepower to pick up where words leaveoff. Certainly, since antiquity words and music have swam in the samewaters, sometimes swimming laps over one another – but for the mostpart written language has remained only a strong arm and lifelong allyto the land of music. This, when music is, in so many ways, literary.This, when song is story. And story, is song.
Somewhere in these swampy waters, where words and music swim secretlyunder the coyote moon together, there is a place called Bad Luck City.
I like the idea of a sound filling an entire room for an hour at atime. I like the idea of music transporting me: To a place. To a space,as though the front door of a venue is a wormhole. For this reason, thelife-size act of Bad Luck City (Dameon Merkl, vocals; Greg Kammerer,guitar; Josh Perry, guitar; Jeremy Ziehe, bass; Kelly O'Dea, violin;Andrew Warner, drums) is aptly named. You walk into Bad Luck City, itdoesn’t walk into you. As when you arrive at any gate, when you arestanding in front of Bad Luck City, you are aware that you havearrived, somewhere.
Standing in a room with the band and there’s a couple things that willimmediately overwhelm you: the band’s large, spooky sound; O’Dea’sviolin playing; and most certainly, Dameon Merkl – his presence, hisclick and teething pace on the stage along with his broken man’scadence and literary lyrics.
In large part, Bad Luck City is literary in the same way you would saythat Dameon Merkl is the band’s vocalist. Because really, you wouldn’tsay that he is the band’s lead singer. Merkl doesn’t sing. He moans andmulls over his words in that hushed, precise kind of way that a mancontemplates a monumental manipulation. Instead you’ll find the music’ssong and singer in the violin that Kelly O’Dea cradles. O’Dea’s stringsdrive the melodic charge that the boys behind push, gaiting through theswampy lands outside Bad Luck City limits.
Even when the sun is in the skies, Bad Luck City sits in a mercurialand dark basin. In the middle of every where and nowhere, it has big,naked, open spaces surrounding the haunted buildings of Main Street.The deputy painters of this landscape are the guitars and drums.
But like any city, this city is defined by its people, the stories oftheir lives. And those stories are told by O’Dea’s violin and Merkl’swords.
Some of these stories are of a man sitting atop the floorboards wherehe buries the dead, counting his trespasses and crimes. “In a city ofthe dead, a living man must find a private tomb”, Merkl says. Some ofthese stories center around the namesake of Bad Luck’s current album, Adelaide:a horse whose legs break in a race. At the finish line, Adelaide isinjected with death and driven away after “the crowd moaned its sullenserenade”.
Both Merkl’s presence and words serve as the band’s sixth instrument.As a writer, his aptitude for story is strong, as are his cadence andpacing. Ultimately, Merkl is a writer, reciting his tales verbally.
In “Bones” Merkl writes, “There are seven places to hide your bonesupstairs/Although I doubt anyone would notice or really even care/I’veseen the best of men swallowed by the ground”. In his despairing “TheWidow of Frances Colver”, the weak-hearted widow writes, “But somewhereI read ‘Let the dead eat the dead’/And let us broken wrecks dancedrunkenly at the edge”.
With six people in a band, and most notably two guitars – things couldget muddy in Bad Luck City. However, Greg Kammerer and Josh Perry’stwelve strings of texture are predicated more on the idea of aconversation than a riff factory. And for this, the citizens of thetown have been blessed with open spaces to run when the lights go downover the hills and witchy streams.
In Bad Luck City you will find a grand articulation of their blessingas a unit, as a town: here, the idea of conversation drives the horsesof dialogue – between the guitars, O’Dea’s singing violin, Ziehe’sbasslines and Warner’s drums. And where that conversation could turninto something rote, Warner is at all times the conductor of theircounty trains – pushing the band into uncomfortable dynamics, the holyprovenance to a grounded and fluid flow of dialogue.
While Bad Luck City hits many of the blackened, minor keys that some oftheir Queen City predecessors have struck – I would not push them intothat americana, roots kind of company. Instead, what Bad Luck City hasmanaged to create is something particularly fresh, as clean asfortune’s backside can be.
The proof is in the live show behind the wormhole door. The proof is inthe dead horse and her recordings. The proof is in the caveat I think Iread on the city’s gates – the first lines of Herman Hesse’s Steppenwolf: “For Madmen Only”.
If you’re ready for a story, pay your dues and walk through the gatesof Bad Luck City. For more of the City’s dark past, as well as theirlighted, zenith future: www.myspace.com/badluckcity.
12:57 PM
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