Murder by Death
Satan’s had traffic with such bands before. I mean, I love Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds–but who do you think would let those guys sign a “record” contract? Satan and satanic figures have gotten interesting treatment in Cave’s oeuvre, and Cave even went so far as to write a country-goth novel. But the Bad Seeds were never country enough to keep their devil appropriately ugly: by the end of “Loverman” he’s even getting laid. A really frightening country-goth epic requires the willingness to both humanize and deglamorize evil–to present, as the old Christian epic poets did, a genuinely unflattering portrait of sin.
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Enter Little Joe Gould, an intense collegiate quartet with the usual drums and guitar plus creepy keyboards and the cello of Sarah Balliet, who ranges all over the instrument to get majestic low vibrato as well as fiddlelike wails. The band made fans of kids who saw them live, but some folks complained that their debut album, Like the Exorcist, but More Breakdancing (recorded in Chicago by Tim Iseler), was unfocused.
But it also recalls the archetypal hypocrite of Paradise Lost, who, on his way to the Garden of Eden, sneaks (sneaks? the bastard stops to ask directions!) past the angel Uriel in the guise of a cherub: “[He] each perturbation smooth’d with outward calme / Artificer of fraud; and was the first / That practisd falshood under saintly shew, / Deep malice to conceale, couch’t with revenge.”
