D.S. Yancey Salt the Earth & Fill Your Hands
Thinker Thought Records
So, who the hell is D.S. Yancey? Well, he’s a trucker. Actually, he’s a trucker with an acoustic guitar and a harmonica, so I guess that makes him a blue collar troubadour of sorts. He’s the kind of bare naked and broken folk singer who tells stories of love, loss, and the people and places who fill the American landscape. Salt the Earth & Fill Your Hands, the Phoenix singer’s second album, is a musical travelogue, a bittersweet scrapbook filled with heroes, losers, Jesus, hard times, bad luck, the rape of the land, life on the road, and the belief that the oft-dismal pursuit of the American dream means just gettin’ by as best you can. The songs ramble with a country n’ punk soul, Yancey’s voice straining with the emotion of a man who’s seen it all but is still struggling to understand it, and, despite their occasions of misanthropy (or perhaps because of them), provide an abundance of comfort in their dusty truth. If he hasn’t yet, Yancey really ought to be mentioned in the same breath as singer/songwriters like Tim Barry, Chuck Ragan, Cranford Nix, and Jay Bennett. D.S. Yancey, then, is a trucker with an acoustic guitar and a harmonica, headed down the highway that leads to glory.
Listen to “Barstow To Vegas” from Salt the Earth & Fill Your Hands!
First, I want to apologize for the lack of posts lately. The laptop has been suffering some major issues and so I’ve been without a full-time computer for about a week now, but a new one has been procured, so we should be getting back on track here real soon. I’ve got plenty of new stuff to throw your way. Anyway, I manged to watch some movies during all that non-computer time, so here you go…
Frozen
The idea behind Frozen, the 2010 horror movie about three skiers stuck on a chair lift high above a mountain side, kind of reminds me of the old Mitch Hedberg joke about the above-ground swimming pool commercial, and how it can only be 30 seconds long because that’s the most amount of time you can depict having fun in an above-ground swimming pool. I didn’t think it would be possible to squeeze a whole movie’s worth of scares out of such an above-ground premise (and it wasn’t, really), but Frozen does manage to push your anxiety meter well into the red simply because it thrives on a totally reasonable, palpable fear. That being said, it’s not hard to predict what lies ahead for our stranded skiers (i.e. finding a way down, frostbite, etc.), who don’t seem to be taking their survival very seriously (do up your coat, idiot!), and you have to be able to handle the kind of dialogue that evolves from a stranded situation, such as blaming, arguing, crying, and reminiscing. However, the circling, hungry wolves were an excellent touch.
Retro fuzz from a trio of Montreal scamps, including Priestess’ main man, Mikey Heppner, who’s found a weirdly raucous outlet for his progressive tendencies with friends Kathryn McCaughey and Shawn Butchart, who come together with all the charm and mystery of urban ne’er-do-wells sittin’ on a stoop, smokin’ cigarettes, and slackin’ off. Much like the band’s maligned name, the songs on Uncle Bad Touch’s self-titled debut scratch away at your mind like a repressed memory and blink like a wired third eye thanks to all the lo-fi riffing, vocal squealing, freaky grooves, and meandering flute. What I mean is there’s whole bunch of strange love (natch) on this record, a sort of acid-fried satori and electric soul that seems to draw its sketchy influences from the downer rock of the late 60s, and should please fans of Witch, RTX/Royal Trux, Danava, or Dungen.
D.S. Yancey
Frozen
Uncle Bad Touch