Velvet Apple Music
Viking Moses : The Parts That Showed -LP/CD- (US,re.2009)****
“The parts that showed” sounds like an ironic title referring to the image of a woman, who became like a prostitute in and of or for her life. It is a thematic concept by singer-songwriter Brendon Massei (on voice and nylon guitar) and his band, recorded at the Oldham family farm in Kentucky (recorded by Paul Oldham), with a style influence from this environment which shows itself too, without losing its own set of visions.
Viking Moses’ band is Spencer Kingman on piano and voice (Spenking), John McCauley III on electric guitar and voice (Deer Tick), Cody Brant on bass and Jacob Soto on drums (Flaspar), and Evelyn Weston on singing saw.
At first hearing most of it sounded like being in a bit more directly performed post-Americana style, and for which, like this style easily tends to be, there can be moments of darkening the mood tales, and a more instant imagining-oneself-into-it performances of more skeletal solitary thoughts in songs. As a dark opposite to the more nostalgic Country style, which could eventually be seen as a prostituting compromise to the public, also here, this daily life soap can inflict the participant, when singing Dolly Parton’s “I Will Always Love You” with some irony towards a wasted life, even when reminding that Brendon afterwards said that “This album was written with the dream that it might one day be sung by Dolly Parton”. Different from the participation in the flow of self-destructive decomposition with a melancholy that represents the automatisms in life, the first two tracks are expressed like ‘breathing from the heart’, a bit Antony-like even, a convincing tragic and dark entry for this story which shows immediately the determined dark obsessions of the partner in the story on “Old Buck Knife”, before the main character puts her life on a order in a free day off. This breaks the real-life darkness, so that the post-America already swings in its own rocking chair on “sole command of the day”. The singing saw here is like the helping ghost of freedom (the cancelled imagination ghost from the past), and this swing gets even sunnier on “Jones Boys”. But this sweetness in the rocking does not make the story happier, but just more in a distant, in a thought of realization. It is also not to make the story more beautiful, but to show the contrasts in a life perspective. The woman’s memories of an early promising life were in fact beautiful, and because change seemed impossible now, the story ends almost logically with murder, in a murder ballad, without providing with it that necessary change, but a silent calmed down realization and acceptance of the whole range of that reality. On all these tracks Brendon’s voice performed the thoughts of the main character, either as thoughts expressions of her consciousness trying to find comfort in the whole reality, or like the story teller, therefore a different sound of a voice compared to the two earliest and more direct-emotionally confronting tracks. An album and story which unfolds itself thoroughly well.
Originally released by Epiphysis in 2008. Also released in a 350 limited edition colour vinyl.
