Search - Tarbox Ramblers :: A Fix Back East

A great band takes a step forward

Joseph Gioia | Chicago, IL | 02/17/2004

(5 out of 5 stars)

"Fans of the Tarbox Ramblers' first cd, the eponymous 2000 release on Rounder Records, will have reason to pause over the band's long-awaited second release, "A Fix Back East". Where that nearly flawless first record gives the feeling of walking into a cheerful roadhouse with the band swinging for a roomful of tipsy dancers, "Fix" sounds like it was recorded in an empty inner city ballroom at 4 in the morning; the crowd long gone as the singer tries to make sense of wasted lives for a scattering of customers too drunk or doped up to move or care. Where the first record showcased Daniel Kellar's virtuoso fiddle playing in playful counterpoint to Michael Tarbox's sharp guitar lines, "Fix" features Kellar's fiddle in a serene coupling, by turns mournful and menacing, with a guitar that growls and wails. Dark? You damn bet. Difficult? Well, I guess. But it is music that rewards repeated hearings; tales of killings and betrayals resolve briefly and scatter, a couple spirituals offer a glimmer of hope - lighted storefront missions in a criminal nightscape - before fading in the rearview mirror. "A Fix Back East" is rooted firmly in the bedrock of American outsider music. It is part of no particular era and it is never going away. A brave departure for what is essentially a cover band, "A Fix Back East" offers several original songs, crafted very much in traditional modes. "It's hard to know/harder to accept/the pain that we cause" sings the narrator of the brooding title track, a ballad of infidelity. "I learned to live within the beast/My heart's exploding and I'm expecting less/There's a fix on me in the east." This is a little more complicated than anything sung by Dock Boggs or A.P. Carter, but they would instantly understand the singer's decayed spirit. Tarbox's experience-aged vocals, mixed closer to the front than in the first record, carry as much weight as any of the instruments. The Tarbox Ramblers have a devoted young following in that most collegiate of towns, Cambridge, Mass. Their live shows are an engaging, often hypnotic mix of old country blues, Carter Family ballads, religious songs, jug band standards and electrified folk music, all adapted to a distinct alt-rock sensibility. The Ramblers play for dancing and drinking customers up and down the East Coast and have been favorably reviewed by the New Yorker magazine and Washington Post. Tarbox could have stuck to the formula for the new cd and played festivals for as long as he wanted. One can only hope that the broader vision on display in "Fix" will be rewarded by a wider appreciation of his art. Recent personnel changes have modified the band's live sound. Gone is Kellar and his fiddle and the fine bass playing and high harmonies of John Sciascia. But Tarbox might be the best slide guitarist we got going, working with a couple pawnshop-special electric guitars that owe their sound more to duct tape and old pickups than any great skill in their manufacture. And the band's mission is the same, connecting live audiences with a living musical tradition that springs from the pain of loss and death. And, anyway, what's music for?"

An Explosive Masterpiece

Joseph Gioia | 03/31/2004

(5 out of 5 stars)

"By turns brooding, dreamy and explosive, "A Fix Back East" clearly draws on traditional music as a source of inspiration. But there's something else going on here that makes this album completely unique. Drenched in blues, these tracks have a noirish sensibility, akin in some ways Wm. Burroughs's novel "Naked Lunch," Dassin's "Night in the City," and landmark recordings like "White Light/White Heat" and "Tonight's the Night." The comparison to books and movies, as well as to other CDs, is intentional: each of these cuts unfolds slowly, with a sprawling cinematic quality that's found throughout the album. And bandleader Michael Tarbox is a killer songwriter, with verse after shimmering verse conveying an otherworldly sense of strangeness with compelling, at times anguished, immediacy. A few examples:"Through the yawning railyard hear the lonesome brakeman cuss
And Jesus redeemer calling back through the dust;"
(Already Gone)"Night falls, memory returns, I trace each hour that's passed
Forsaken loves call my name and claim me as their own at last...
Outside the air is sweet, the water so still, Honeysuckle's on the vine
People say there's a heaven somewhere, I know I'll make it mine."
(A Fix Back East)Other favorites on "A Fix Back East" are the haunted, yearning "Were You There?" and the jarring "Ashes to Ashes," which combines lyrical precision with a loose, seemingly improvised performance featuring some of the album's most powerful - and ominous - guitar playing. Tarbox also pays homage to his influences with his take of Dock Boggs's "Country Blues." It's a raucous guitar/drum assault featuring some of the meanest slide playing you'll hear anywhere.I first learned about Tarbox Ramblers, and their new album, when I came across a description of its "grimy, thrilling noise" - an opinion I second. This raw, urgent CD will strike a chord with listeners who favor intensity and who are looking for something new."

AMG Review of "A Fix Back East"

miriam rodrigues | NYC | 06/09/2004

(5 out of 5 stars)

"Hey everyone,I just came across this review of the new Tarbox CD and thought I'd share it. It's from the All Music Guide, and is the best description of "A Fix Back East" I've read.
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Four years ago, when the Tarbox Ramblers introduced their train wreck of swamp blues, hillbilly, gospel, and woolly folk, the North Mississippi Allstars, Black Keys, Fiery Furnaces, or that Detroit band with the funny clothes, weren't even blips on the screen. Now they're the competition. It's OK, it's a big world, and with A Fix Back East, the Tarbox Ramblers go down into the deep reaches of their frontman's collective American Gothic psyche, and dredge up the ghosts, the faded photographs, the myths and texts of a time that may never have existed in the popular consciousness. This is a much wilder record; yet its very rawness contains starkly beautiful textures that are drenched in sepia-toned images, and black and white newsreels from the focal point of the ravaged human heart. The album opens with a huge, R.L. Burnside-styled barroom record machine groove. Using the riff from "Honey Hush," and warping it all to hell, Michael Tarbox indulges his iconographic marriage of rural loneliness, backwater holiness, and steaming sex, which, immediately after is dragged through a drunkenly redemptive version of "Were You There (When They Crucified My Lord?)" where violins, electric guitars, and echoing drums from time immemorial try to match the grief and longing in Tarbox's convicted voice. But it's right back to hell in the band's caveman read of Dock Boggs' "Country Blues," with a roiling slide guitar all nasty and distorted, like it was calling from the devil's playground. And this is where it all starts. From the elegiac loss and shimmer of the title track, to the backwoods two-step of the American traditional song, "No Night There," to the murderous gutter blues of "Honey Babe," this is a slash and burn affair that holds it secrets close, and offers its dirty treasures abundantly and regally -- if the parades in Robert Frank's The Americans are your idea of majesty. Produced by Jim Dickinson, Paul Q. Kolderie, and Sean Slade, this is the banshee's howl after all the liquor is gone; it's the drunken, lascivious, preacher's moan when he's still in the whorehouse at seven a.m. on Sunday morning; a dying bluesman's final snarl at a world that's left him empty and broke, and a brokenhearted cowboy's last lament -- all rolled into one. ~ Thom Jurek, All Music Guide"