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This White Man's Burden, 1998
Checkered Past
With a voice mined from the past, singer-songwriter Tom House wondrously evokes the sounds of rural Kentucky. Jagged and coarse, House's voice slips through the music, working as its own instrument with loosely orchestrated highs and lows, bellows and dirges. Steeping his sound in the fundamentals of bluegrass, hillbilly and other rough, unclassifiable sounds of the Ozarks, House marries yesterday and today, always deftly blurring the dateline and imbuing the ideology with an almost gothic pathos.
This is a dark ode to the monumental legacies of the likes of Bill Monroe and Hazel Dickens. "I've been holding on for too long, something that's all but gone, I couldn't see, what's the matter with me? " sings House, his melancholy growl inspiring colorful details into the literary settings sketched by his words. "She hears a whispering, she hears a buzzing, Jenny's her cousin, she's barely 16. She's dancing barefoot, laughing and cutting up, and Mickey just eats it up, hootin' and hollerin'." Stark yet drunk with emotion, this is a riveting listen.
- Rachel Leibrock
The Neighborhood Is Changing, 1997
Checkered Past
Tom House's first full-length disc is a troubling artifact: here is work so obsessed with squalor it flirts with valorizing it. There are fantasies of surrender to flailing vulgarity; classic revenge motifs fractured by phrasing designed to impart either distracted rage or the bleakest obliviousness; and plaints which speak of love but insist on alienation instead. The sum expression is of a bad conscience so pervasive in its despair that it's suffocating. That there is also one remarkable revisioning of the old-time Southern gospel style ("Soil Of The Earth") should come as no surprise.
The music is the product of an equally fractured vision of the string band tradition. All of the components are there, but they often function as a kind of faded punctuation to whatever is most dissolute or obscene in the world of hard margins House has dedicated himself to. He subordinates many of his tunes's rhythms to unhinged lyrical meter; the results range from uncommonly angular breaks to a few actual dropped beats or mid-verse tempo shifts.
These oddities ultimately prove reflective of the instincts at the record's center: if this music sometimes sounds like it's falling apart, that's because the voice it couches speaks in an acid tongue.
- Bill Sacks
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