I don’t know what they’re adding to the Kansas City water supply, but judging by the music Carrie Nation And The Speakeasy (aka CNS) create, I want some. Their admixture of brass and bluesgrass is fairly intoxicating, and it’s been colouring our world with acidic, psychedelic visions for well over 15 years. Dixieland to punk, ska to blues, there’s nothing that CNS won’t throw into their musical skillet and this makes their latest EP, LOGOS, a gift that reveals its dark delights spin after spin.
With notes that shine like icicles in winter sun, ‘Bad Miracles’ is an instrumental of ethereal and haunting beauty. It feels as if a lot of effort has been expended on achieving just the right tone, and that employed here reaches deep inside and resonates on some primordial level. However, what starts out as an exquisite piece of music, poetry without words, soon becomes something far more disquieting and discombobulating. Layers of sound are gradually added almost imperceptibly (not unlike walking through quicksand) and before the listener realises, they are totally subsumed in CNS’ world. Actually, it makes the perfect prelude to LOGOS and means that when the following ‘Soot Follows Cinder’ hits, it hits exceptionally hard. The difference between the two tracks is night and day, with each acting as a foil to enhance and highlight the other. Like some kind of Hillbilly thrash it’s genre hopping and hyperactive, and if Tarantino’s Titty Twister house band were made three-dimensional then I imagine they’d sound a lot like this.
Carrie Nation And The Speakeasy are fiercely independent; self-published, recorded and booked, and this has given them a lot of creative freedom. One thing they could never be accused of is being generic; each of these five tracks are markedly different and inhabit a unique sonic space, from the New Orleans, opium den voodoo of ‘Antonius Block’s Confession’ to the sea shanty-inspired ‘Cover The Altar’, LOGOS is an organic beast that’s always shapeshifting and is threaded by its own eclecticism. Yet, it’s not only musically that CNS challenge the listener’s perceptions, but aesthetically too. They might cut the persona of mountain men from Deliverance, drunk on moonshine and crazed by mescaline, but lyrical themes include heady subjects such as carbon cycles and Ingmar Bergman’s Seventh Seal. It’s an interesting juxtaposition and, just like the sleeve in which it is housed, it makes LOGOS a multilayered and multi-textured affair that will reveal new perspectives on successive spins.
Self-described “folk-punk for people who don’t like folk-punk” and that’s precisely what final track ‘Gulls Of The Glow’ serves up. My only complaint with LOGOS is that is too darn short, but truth be told, CNS have packed more into these twenty minutes than most bands pack into an entire career.
- LOGOS is self-released on 2nd February 2024 and is available here.
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Track List:
- Bad Miracles
- Soot Follows Cinder
- Antonius Block’s Confession
- Cover The Altar
- Gulls Of The Glow
