It was one of Empty Bottle's Free Mondays when Puerto Muerto performed their last concert. It feels so different when you know that is so. You ask as you watch, which of these new songs will only see this one live performance. Which old songs have seen their last? Which will you not ever see, but only hear in your car, or ipod. Live performances matter, more so when they are the last one. So I soaked up Christa Meyer belting out "San Pedro" with her mezzo soprano voice. This only time to see "Song of the Moon", and "Tamar". This dying breath was to promote the Drumming For Pistols CD. It was a Free Monday at the Empty Bottle. It's like before there was ever recorded music, this live show was awesome, but all too fleeting. So I took pictures and video with that urgency to preserve the moment. When I put the camera down it was for the same reason. Some things you wanna see just with your own eyes. And Christa was just bouncing all over the stage with that first song. She has this really peculiar way of dancing, and some songs just bring it out. I don't think it's a deliberate thing, it's just what comes out of her naturally from the gut. The gut does not think of display, it just does, and she dances that way and I love it.
I only have a fraction of their collection, but enough to believe that there is iconic stuff in every thing they produce. There is something I like in everything I got from them. The music ages with you, because it comes in already sounding old and wise and you just catch up. Their stuff is hard to describe for me. There is country there, but not in the way you think. There is rock there....but not in the way you think. It's like old frontier sounding country, truck driving country....Johnny Cash country. They once did their own soundtrack for the movie "Texas Chainsaw Massacre". I would argue that the rest of their music is for a Faulkner novel. Dark, intense, tragic, but balanced with that Nick Cave coolness. Their style of darkness is timeless because they are not immediate and obvious. I guess thats really why I put Puerto Muerto in the same company as Faulkner. They cast a similar shadow for me. And so "Tamar" from Drumming For Pistols sounds crazy dark and sexy like dancing to Joy Division. There is something about a band that can make you like a song about a dad molesting his child (at least that is what I believe I heard them say), even as you wince at the tragedy of the subject. Bad writing can sound gratuitous and cheap, a juvenile display of depth. Bad writing decays fast. There is no such thing here, only good consistent songwriting, with a mature approach to their dark subject matter. In the live shows I've been to, they were not dressed like rock stars. That elusive subcultural appeal comes to them without effort or overt display. It's under the plain midwestern surface. There was nothing in their clothes that projected "Texas Chainsaw Massacre", not even a plain black Bauhaus shirt. But once you know it's there you always see it. For those that do have that Bauhaus shirt, I think I can sell you this band. The pictures I put up will be of when they did this festival in the summer of 2009 in Logan Square I believe, and of that one free Monday.
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