Daughn Gibson

The second album from Daughn Gibson, Pennsylvania's finest sampler-savvy folk songwriter, is a curious thing. Surrounding his bruised workman's croon (Gibson recently left the trucking industry), there's dark musical grandeur that intimidates and allures like eerie dancing at a dank bar with chain-swinging bikers brawling in shady corners. It's intriguing, but not somewhere you're comfortable. "Your daddy was a beast," he rasps on "The Sound of Law," over a creepy breeze of drumrolls and spaghetti western shimmers, an opening gambit evoking Nick Cave's feistier mid-career output. Peer deeper and there's subtle embellishments, a kind of musical sub-plot that colours the bleak narratives. "You Don't Fade" spotlights an anguished, postnatal mother who "can't keep my baby quiet, can't keep my baby quiet." It's a sweetly serene song overlaid with severed pitchshifted whimpers that complicate the child's fate. Often evoking Slim Twig's Lolita-based concept album, A Hound at the Hem, Me Moan broaches dark subject matter with unnerving nonchalance, which is the point, as affected vocals distance artist from subject. Though melodically limited, the record establishes Gibson as an alluring personality and songwriter whose Sub Pop efforts will, you suspect, bear enough dark fruit to last the seasons.