Pitchfork

Sick, sick, sick. That's what this album is. Oh sure, it sounds pretty, with its gentle, mostly acoustic arrangements, whispery vocals, and other folkish whatnot, but wait a second. All those references to grinding bones and eating flesh and burying things aren't metaphors or poetic turns of phrase-- they're actually about killing people, eating them, and burying them. Songwriter and principle vocalist Jacob Thomas Berns sounds musically well adjusted, but I get the feeling he was the kid who worried his eight grade English teacher with disturbing journal entries about sexual violence and cold-blooded murder.

Berns is abetted by two accomplices in these crimes. Multi-instrumentalist Ernest Christian Kiehne, Jr. colors the arrangements with jaunty banjo, some lovely steel guitar, and the occasional subdued organ part, while second vocalist Sonya Maria Cotton, who is a really damn fine singer, gets down in the dirt with Berns and assists in the drownings, statutory rapes, and shootings with disconcerting ease. "Let me cover you up/ With my flannel shirt/ Your skin so cold without a skirt on." Those are the opening lines of the record, on a song called "Better For It, Kid". Uh, yeah. Take the "kid" part literally and you pretty much figured out what happens in the song.

The very next track, "Mess Around", opens with a guy talking to a young girl, telling her it's okay if she wants to mess around, and goes on to say that her body will be found before her hair can grow out long. But the music is this pretty acoustic fingerpicking and the vocals are more fragile than Delftware-- it's an insidious and nauseating juxtaposition, but it's no worse than some of the darkest murder ballads that populate the established songbook. If nothing else, the little bird that lit down on Henry Lee has some company now.

So here's the thing: I can't decide if this is all unforgivably repulsive or totally ingenious. The record disarms you so thoroughly with its gentleness and lack of dissonance that when you get to figuring out the content, you almost become like one of the victims from Berns' songs. There are moments of striking beauty, like the steel guitar intro to "O, Ohio" or the organ passage that takes up the end of "Buried Treasure", which is fairly close to Low's "Sunflower" in its overall feeling. Cotton's lead vocals on "Swimming in the Swamp" are coldly perfect as she sings matter-of-factly about disposing of a body with dirt in its mouth in a vast swamp.

My overall impression is conflicted-- the songs are nice-sounding but not terribly memorable melodically, and they all tend to follow a formula of a couple verses followed by a short instrumental passage, the last of which finally goes fully electric, with a wailing e-bowed guitar part. As much as I love brevity, I think they might benefit from stretching out a bit and developing the stories in the songs. The combination of dainty folk music with murderous and lecherous themes is decently executed, but you have to wonder if they can do it again without it feeling tired. Personally, I can't decide whether to listen to it once more or stop Berns before he kills again.