by Kevin Galaba on April 29, 2009

Bad Luck City’s Dameon Merkl points in the direction his vocals should be going at 3 Kings Tavern. Photos by Jason Claypool.

What I really dig about Bad Luck City — alongside the music — is the band’s fondness for professional presentation. Much like fellow locals DeVotchka, their sartorial attire brings a sense of formality and gentility to their performances. At 3 Kings Tavern on Saturday, for example, the band took the stage in dark suits, dress shoes and black ties.

Frontman Dameon Merkl emerged from backstage after the band’s soundcheck, his black tie loose in the collar of his white button-down shirt, an ash-colored five o’clock shadow splashed across his face. With a fistful of Pabst Blue Ribbons he approached the microphone, looking like both a tired film-noir detective and a jaded but madly inspired poet.

And a poet is what he truly is. With the band’s first song, Merkl began to weave his stories. His performance wasn’t so much spoken word as an example of the simple art of storytelling, of narrative. Merkl has fabricated compelling chronicles of desperate characters eking out gritty lives in the margins of society. As he recounted his tales, he poked the air with his index finger, stabbing home every word, hammering every jigsaw syllable precisely into place, herding every image into the frame to make the picture complete. He resembled a mad preacher, sermonizing passionately in a tent on a hot Mississippi night, railing about the perils of straying from God’s divine plan.

But much of it was lost. I’d seen Bad Luck City perform once before and was inspired by the uniqueness of the band’s approach. If only the sound system at 3 Kings could have done justice to the vocal aspect of the show. By the second song, the crowd screamed out for more volume on Merkl’s microphone. Merkl, embarrassed, meekly asked the sound tech, “Can I get, um, a little more in the vocals…?” It didn’t happen.

Usually, the 3 Kings stage is invaded by denizens from some fetid swamp in hell, who load a van with musical instruments and make the journey to this, our brighter world. The beasts then unload their van in front of the South Broadway venue and spend the night blasting muddled, unintelligible garbage from tortured amplifiers.

This might be acceptable most nights, but a Bad Luck City show demands more clarity. The band conjures dark imagery, but it’s a different kind of darkness than the typical 3 Kings fare. When violinist Kelly O’Dea (in a nice dress, not suit and tie) plucked her violin strings instead of plying them with her bow, the band danced. It could have been a scene from a Tim Burton movie. It was dark, but fun, not taking itself too seriously.

So, we responded to the raw emotion of the songs that began simply, meticulously, always building to a frenzied finish as the lives of Merkl’s characters fell apart, or until they realized, too late, and in a lonely hotel room in the vast southwest wastelands of America, some darkly shining truth that had eluded them all their lives.

Kevin Galaba is a Denver-based writer and regular contributor to Reverb.

Jason Claypool is a digital photographer from Lakewood. He specializes in concert, music and event photography. His work is available as large-format prints. His complete profile, with contact information, is here, and his collections are here. Track his show calendar on Gigbot.

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