CD Review: The Gentle Guest "We Are Bound To Save Some Souls Tonight

The Gentle Guest's previous release Our Little Ruckus aspirated soft elegies evocative of its recording near the sandstone hills and forested dells of northern Wisconsin. A year later, We Are Bound To Save Some Souls Tonight sounds like the distillate of a darker tableau, one adumbrated by a midnight fire set on derelict train tracks now a ladder for repentant bacchanalians climbing their way back from the bar.

Locomotive dirges predominate, though their loose choruses remain silent during Eric Rykal's few solo jeremiads. Rykal is The Gentle Guest's contemplative impetus, a narrator supported on We Are Bound... by chugging drums, sinuous horn breaks and seven or eight singing friends. This procession of penitential revelers confronts sin, manifestations of the devil and the possibility of forgiveness after death as it staggers toward righteous salvation.

The album's first single "Down at the Still" evidences this cohesive yet dualistic atmosphere of carousal and lament as Rykal speaks to an anonymous "you" who has been "reading drunken lines from Genesis." Many of the songs are written in the second-person and feel as if they are throwing their arm around the listener, even if, after telling us "I know you/and you know me," Rykal admits "I'm not the man I pretend to be." The shady personalities and percussive chants of songs like "Liar and a Gentleman" are impressively reminiscent of Closing Time-era Tom Waits doing an Alice-era Tom Waits song. A distinct narrative is sustained throughout, so that by the time the seventh track "Love Long Dead" references the female ghost who has been following Rykal since the opening "She Devil," it acknowledges them as familiar characters recurring amid a larger drama.

This sense of familiarity might grow slightly too strong as the album progresses, and the songs do not stray far from their bawling blues time signatures. The sins and she-spirits faced by Rykal never seem to materialize fully, leaving elements of the overall lyrical content less than totally engaging. Nick Cave's Murder Ballads, for example, describes a similar cast of spiritual transgressors, yet its compact and twisted writing develops the story of each sinner until our perception of the character is changed entirely by song's end. The lyrics on We Are Bound... occasionally lack such intriguing specificity and advancement, and as a result listeners can generally predict their trajectory. Rykal has created a uniquely inhabited world, but adding a few more surprising details in place of some currently repetitious refrains might build up the portions that start to flatten by the final tracks.

Still, the bells and brief spoken word sample that preface the final two tracks "Ship Without a Crew" and "This Town is Dead," respectively, are a welcome addition and might presage Rykal's expanded narrative capacities in the future. We Are Bound to Save Some Souls Tonight is a promising return that sings and stomps through its stories of sin, salvation, and whiskey stills.

Score: 8/10

Sounds Like: Murder by Death plays the Reverend Horton Heat.

Previous MCMB Coverage:
Mp3 of the Day: The Gentle Guest "Down at the Still"

Stream the entire album here.