Vinyl Tap: House of Freaks - Tantilla

I get a new turntable and dust off some old records. Vinyl Tap #49:

On their stripped-down but striking 1988 debut Monkey On A Chain Gang, the guitar-and-drums duo House of Freaks ends with an emphatic Wolfeian declaration that “You Can Never Go Home”:

Standing on a dusty road
Praying for a sign
Lightning only struck me once
And then it struck me blind

You can never go home.

But — as indicated by "When The Hammer Came Down," the lead-off track on the group's 1989 sophomore stunner Tantilla — after reaction comes resignation: “Put away my sorrows and put away my pain / And I’m never ever looking back 'cause nothing ever gonna be the same.” This acquiescence marks just one attitudinal extreme on the richly polished yet fleshed-out and folk-flavored follow-up -- a keyboard is added but a barely missed bass is still lacking.

The gamut of emotions explored within this complex and cohesive Southern Gothic — or "New South Gothic" — masterwork includes Civil War and biblical themes running to the turbulently played and sung atheistic anger that “Life’s too short and it’s so odd / That it made me believe in a malevolent God…”

House of Freaks, originally from Richmond, Virginia, are Bryan Harvey (guitars and vocals), and Johnny Hott (drums and percussion), both of whom wrote powerhouse and highly propulsive and harrowing songs exemplified by incisive lyrics and evocative imagery with inspiration that — in the ferocious "The Righteous Will Fall" — makes "talking shop" somehow synonymous with speaking in tongues.

Lyrically, too, “Birds of Prey,” a rollicking and rootsy Blasters-meets-the-Band tale of transit and trouble, meets its metaphoric match as it colorfully gathers steam for its picaresque pace: 

At the crack of dawn
I heard the rooster crow
Packed my bags and split
Hopped the C & O
Driftin’ through the South
‘Til the soaker turned me in
And spent a long cold week in the can 
With just a soaker for a friend…

If you could see me now
With this ball and chain
You'd run me out of town again
You'd never believe a word I say
But they're picking at my bones like birds of prey

The duo further considers the Old South and the Reconstruction era in songs such as “White Folk’s Blood,” in which Harvey seethes about “What mysteries flow through these white folk's blood.” And in the country-fried “Big Houses” the narrator ponders where master, mistress, field-hands and foremen “gather ‘round… While the walls of our world came crumbling down” — for the "cause of fools never dies" and the "face of glory lies down in the mud."

Article Author: Gordon Hauptfleisch

Gordon Hauptfleisch is a Blogcritics Books Editor, freelance writer, and book reviewer for the San Diego Union Tribune. For many years he worked in and managed bookstores and record stores. Email him and he'll stop talking in the third-person.
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