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Marah: Angels of Destruction

Contributed By: Lion on The Table
Created On: Wednesday, 05 March 2008
Hits: 32

Angels of Destruction

This is it: Finally, an alt-country answer to Exile on Main Street. This record not only reaches the Stones' finest moment, but surpasses it by dipping deeper into the American musical catalog, stitching a beautiful quilt of blues, country, folk, and everything else this country has to offer in the realm of popular music, back to the 1920s. ‘Twas such a pain in our collective American backside that the Stones -- a bunch of Limeys – were the ones to record the most sloppy, definitive American blues-rock album.

Incredibly, Jagger and his henchmen bottled the spirit of Muddy Waters, Chuck Berry, and James Brown and -- through some sort of nuclear guitar fission -- created the most deliciously magical noise since Robert Johnson himself strummed his guitar and watched as the tra-a-ain left the stayyy-shion. It gave a lot of rock fans be the same sinking feeling NASCAR fans will get when a Toyota car wins the "Great American Race," the Daytona 500. (When that happens, it will be an all-time great accomplishment. We'll give the driver, car, and racing team their props, because they will legitimately have earned them. Then we'll head on over to our favorite watering hole and lament nostalgically about how Detroit used to make all the world-beaters.)

Marah, with Angels of Destruction, takes back the blues-rock mantle for the Yanks, with its own gorgeously sloppy magnum rock opus: Listen closely and you'll hear banjos, accordion, tuba, fiddles, a baritone sax and even a calliope in the mix. Oh, and bagpipes. But that's not to say Angels of Destruction is some sort of nostalgia cruise for music-history buffs, or a scorecard exercise for the folk Luddites looking to see how many obscure instruments a band can jam into their arrangements. It's a rock record dripping with bluesy rock, loose but not to the point of self-conscious raggedness.

The one exception would be the unlisted bonus track "Tippecanoe County Correctional Theme Park," which is very drunk and circus-y--appropriately so, having touched off a hilarious online war between the band and the Lafayette, IN locals in the wake of bandleader Dave Bielanko's arrest for public intoxication after falling asleep on a couch in the town's Holiday Inn lobby. It's one part Pavement, one part Sebadoh, and six parts Exile. It's loaded with good beats you can dance to. Bielanko's voice has an unpolished roughness like Jagger, a little out-of-tune, peculiar intonation coupled with a less-menacing-than-Mick sneer that adds a Stones-y feel to the Marah sound.ver you do, give this record a serious listen; you'll be a better music fan for it.