Friday Night: Live music with 13 to the Gallows

Friday, May 29, 2009
8:00 p.m.

FREE

This Friday, Next Coffee Co. welcomes back Arizona’s own 13 to the Gallows, Rhythm Room regulars who have opened for Wayne Hancock and Dale Watson and who will be performing with Bastard Sons of Johnny Cash in two weeks.

To label 13 to the Gallows country, alt-country, or alt-country rockers would be misleading. What they offer veers far outside the borders of any “traditional” country sound. At the same time, although their music shares a certain new-generation “country music revisited” quality with bands like Reckless Kelly, Stoney LaRue, and Micky & the Motorcars, 13 to the Gallows lack the pop sensibility, with its too-easy tendency toward blandness, that has made those other bands darlings of the college crowds (and screaming co-eds) on the Austin music circuit.

Which isn’t to say that 13 to the Gallows aren’t deserving of their own legion of college and lovestruck female fans. But their music isn’t as easy on listeners as the readily digestible rock-pop-country of a Reckless Kelly — these aren’t defiant, blue-sky anthems to the open road or pretty, lovelorn dedications to the one that got away. These songs are gritty, demanding, unforgiving — pieces where not just the lyrics, but the melodies go crashing into bleak corners.

The songs defy a straightforward verse-chorus-bridge structure. The compositions are restless and troubled, rarely allowed to come back to the comfort of an established pattern. A chorus might shift, swapping out words and lines in a way that continually leaves the listener unsettled, unable to say for sure what comes next. The repeated sung title in the background of “Who Am I?” creates a haunted, obsessive unease. In “Boots and Blood,” a plaintive moan halfway through gives way to an oncoming train-rush of guitars and distortion that railroads over all the lingering whispered amblings of the song that came before.

In the best of ways, 13 to the Gallows resist college radio–readiness, with their forgoing of Rascal Flattsian predictable pop hooks and earnest, thematic clichés. The songwriting, in the phrasings of lead vocalist, Branden Pyle, speaks with the sense of someone older, aged and bruised by experience, without illusions about the outcomes of things.

Pyle doesn’t wax rhapsodic about the “ragged ass road,” he’s resigned to it, to the dusty expanse of it and the lone journey toward nothing but more of it. There isn’t love found or love lost here, but love toppled from its rose-petaled pedestal, exposed for all its cobwebs, creaky set pieces, and short-lived veneers. “I’ll head up to Wyoming, find myself a wife,” Pyle sings in “Where the Wind Blows,” “maybe settle down for a little while till I find out who she really is.”

This refusal to inhabit a comfortable pop currency also owes itself, in part, to more than a hint in the band’s music of classic Johnny Cash country and old-school rockabilly along the stylings of Dale Hawkins — although the 13 to the Gallows sound is by no means “old.”

Certainly, you can hear the rejuvenated, surf-tinged neo-rockabilly of The Smokin’ 45s and Huevos Rancheros. But 13 to the Gallows are more than just a case of a group of young guys stepping forward to take on banjos, bluegrass, and tradition, à la Old Crow Medicine Show. Pyle and his bandmates both update conventional genres and bend them. Amidst all the vintage juke-joint revivalism, in Pyle’s voice there’s also the very un-country haze-suffused breathiness of Colin Devlin, the smoke-rattled growl of Davíd Garza, and the electronic-infused musings of Chuck Prophet.

This is Robert Earl Keen via Matthew Ryan — Texas guitar licks over electrified, percussive arrangements and dark, brooding lyrics, a singer aware of his own isolation, the road he’s locked in on, and the remoteness of redemption. “On the other side of the tracks,” Pyle tells us matter-of-factly, without self-pity, “I’ve walked alone most of my life.”

“Some Streets Lead Nowhere” is the title of Ryan’s stunning latest single, and 13 to the Gallows come back again and again to this same awareness of the rare escape, the fragile exit and the collapsing paths that loop in on themselves. “One step forward, a thousand steps back,” Pyle counts off in “Never Alone.”

Even music, that one stage where the songwriter can make the story turn out the way he or she wants, fails to yield a way out for Pyle, in “Who Am I?” becoming only another reminder of breakdowns and failures: “I can sing the notes real low, low as I remember hitting that rock bottom … I can sing the notes real high, high as I once fell.” No one song or library of songs will ever be enough for escape; there’s always the piece that hasn’t been written, the experience that hasn’t been exorcised. Death, explains the speaker of “California Sun,” will be both “the death of me and my story untold.”

Ultimately, the sound of 13 to the Gallows is the uncompromising sound of the Arizona desert — dust-worn; desolate; everywhere, stretching for miles, and following you even when you think you’re getting away.

Lyrically, the band shares perhaps most closely with Whiskeytown this sense of being trapped in an endless place, the small-town resignation of songs like “Jacksonville Skyline” and “Macon, Georgia.” But where Ryan Adams acknowledges his inability to get away, has yielded to it, even “wishing I was still back home,” Pyle is continually, fiercely wrestling against it.

“Vacant parking lots across the street remind me I’m going nowhere,” Ryan Adams sings in “Tennessee Square,” “so I sit here and watch from the porch.” Pyle is equally directionless: “Who am I? I don’t know,” he reflects in one song. “No direction, the road leads me,” he tells us in another. “Still,” he says, refusing to sit and watch like Adams, “need to ramble on.”

Where Adams sings about searching and longing for the love he can no longer find, the love that keeps him rooted to that porch and those vacant lots, Pyle sings about no longer wanting to look.

“Where were you,” Adams asks in “Macon, Georgia.” “Looked for you almost everywhere, but you were nowhere.”

“It’s difficult to go on, knowing you’re out there somewhere,” he adds in “Tennessee Square.”

Pyle, on the other hand, is done with knowing, with remembering: “Far away, … there I lay in the sweet blue grass,” he says in “Boots and Blood,” to “forget about you, my one and only.”

Pyle is perpetually on a mission to forget, always running from something he knows or something he’s done, whether he’s “flying down the street” in “Bad Day,” jumping in his truck to “leave without a trace” in “Where the Wind Blows,” high-tailing it to the highway in “Who Am I?,” or simply headed “far away” in “Boots and Blood.” In these songs, the speaker is always cutting out, always alone, and always aware of it.

Both Pyle and Adams are equally unsuccessful in ever leaving the town or the desert or the lover behind, whether in their car or in their memories, but the characters Pyle sings for still think they can. And it’s these constant, failing attempts at departure that are set in motion, over and over again, in the songs of 13 to the Gallows, circular re-beginnings that lead away but never out.

“I’m on the 60,” Pyle sings in “Bowline,” “I’m leaving you one last time, just me, the road, and my moonshine.”

Always leaving, these voices of 13 to the Gallows, on their own, with no direction. Until you realize, as each next song comes on and the slipping away starts up again, they’ve never left.