Tom Waits? Alright, I’ll buy in. Scott Severin has a growly voice and melodies that can feel both soft and elbowy at the same time. Art rock, they are art rock. So let’s dub Scott a Tom Waits disciple. But something strange happened on the way to the strait jacket… Severin kept slipping out of the straitjacket on his major Birdhouse Obbligato.
What feels like a distorted autobiography by a man who picked up a guitar in the aftermath of 9-11 and works on distorted horror stories that get on planes and can’t get off are actually something else. Sometimes, sometimes disorienting bummers, Birdhouse Obbligato gives it away in the disastrous children’s crusade of “Fartshaist” (“do you understand?” in Yiddish). From the drowning and slavery of the Crusade, Scott leaps to his mother running numbers in 1953 Brooklyn and from there to the point of the album: “Now I’ve got this lucky girl, she has her mother’s mouth and her father’s curls, when she asks me about the evil in the world?”
Scott and his fine band of musicians take old fashioned rock and roll with a twist of lemon and a a shot of tequila and in ten songs of various degrees of horror, the terrifying man in “Birdhouse” freaked out on dexatrim and evil, to the love as necrophilia piano pumping (all the keyboards were done in New York by Joe Delia, former David Johansen/Buster Poindexter player) “The Edge Is Gone” to the borderline theist “Even Jesus”, nothing good seems to happen in these things accept, from having lived through a terrorist attack it retreats from New York for Omaha and makes sense of it for his daughter (and for us) so we can grasp why bad things happen.
In life, Scott seems to see a random terror with no reason, no explanation, a happenstance tough luck except… in art, in music, order is made from chaos and in a child, also, order is made from chaos. The unblinking “New Orleans” -“This town ain’t holding any Superbowl”, is a country jaunt into complete oblivion, is it good? Maybe, but it is too wet and dank and dead to be fun. But what it is is FORM. It puts form onto something which has none. The lonely trumpet solo is like a dirge or a funeral march but it is very melodic, very pretty.”Danger To Yourself” has the swampy feel of Oh Mercy, and makes you wonder what Daniel Lanois could have done with some of these tracks ( The record was engineered by Joel Peterson, the former bassist of The Faint). It is a prog-rock manifesto and the steely guitar riff here is important but I wonder what it would have sounded with an atmospheric disquiet.
It is ungracious to wonder about production on a three year old album, it is like wondering what Phil Spector would’ve done with Born To Run. The fact is it works for what it is and perfaps a deeper bluesier sense of distilled terror can wait for a new album.
Or perhaps the new album will be something else because what Scott has done here is not to be replicated. This is what Scott does in song after song here, he pounds order on to chaos, he changes the random chance of evil into the bordered form of art. And it is an answer for his daughter: it says, life is bad but through our abilities we can take Children’s Crusades and hurricanes and terrorists attacks and we can place order through art and through love.
Grade: B+