The Graveyard Train – The Drink The Devil and The Dance (2010)
The drinking and depravity continued throughout the day, into night, until I could no longer sit still. I was thinking thoughts a man shouldn’t think. The full moon was high and the mist was lurking, draping itself with seductive ease across the beautiful, dim night. I’d been listening to the debut album from Melbourne band The Graveyard Train for hours, possibly days. Who could be sure? I was hypnotised, entranced. I left the safety of home and lurched forward, shuffling down the street, towards the cemetery. All the while the words were ringing in my ears, rattling around my mind in the swirling oblivion of possibility:
I shuffle on down the street.
I can’t help dragging my feet.
Got my two arms leading the way.
And all the people there stop and say…
‘Let’s move like a mummy!’
And so it began; my night in the cemetery, esky of well-stocked beer held tight, howling at the moon about dancing to the devil’s drum, taking witches out dancing and children burning alive. It was tremendous fun, but maybe you had to be there. I was in another world, I was deep in The Graveyard Train and there was no way out. My raised head and out-stretched arms silhouetted against the murky, moon-lit cemetery as I cried out more of their words in wicked delight.
Flames are burning so they close the ride!
But they don’t hear the screaming of the kids inside!
All the children went the same…
Fire licking their tiny brains.
On the hypnotising album in question, The Drink The Devil and The Dance, the majority of these lines are moaned in grim unison by a superb chorus of undead vocalists. The lead vocalist stands out front of this murky procession, leading the lurching in inspired fashion. I’m not sure who to credit for this role, but it’s an impressive performance nonetheless. Listening to this album, there are times when my vibrant cackling comes as a shock even to me, when the giddy delight I get from hearing someone croon about the inevitability of time tearing love apart disturbs my sensibility in a deep and profound way. While this is an admission I may regret making public, I find an immeasurable, perverse joy in howling lines such as these.
You see, if I haven’t made it clear, The Graveyard Train are a band that wallow in the squalid splendour of life’s greatest, most inevitable tragedies. It would be depressing, if it weren’t so catchy, so darkly comedic. It is a truly demented take on the time-honoured gothic folk and blues of the American South: stomping, uproarious, karaoke music for The Devil. The call-and-response nature of the lyrics are likely to leave all who hear it a giddy, swaying mess, spilling their beer all over themselves as they howl to the deep, blackened sky.
The Graveyard Train have an admirable, self-aware dedication to peddling such blues and country-infused murder balladry with a wry, tongue-in-cheek charisma. They are a band best described, and self-described, as a group of ‘Six men (who) play men’s instruments just as men were born to do. Chain, washboard, steel guitar, banjo and harmonica – instruments with a long history of storytelling underlay six voices tempered by whiskey, blood and poverty.’
If your mind has already thrown up Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds as a frame of natural reference, then pat yourself on the back, because their back catalogue is clearly a tomb from whichThe Graveyard Train have been digging. By way of convenient comparison, I would liken The Graveyard Train to the darkly comic Nick Cave you can find in tracks such as The Weeping Song and The Kindness of Strangers. Indeed, the sinister forces abundant in Run Billy Run jig with a similar, malicious intent to those found in the classic Bad Seeds track, The Curse of Millhaven.
It’s a heinous, horrific trip that, unless they record a duet with Kylie Minogue, seems destined to remain well hidden from the Top 40 charts. But for the select few inclined to hop aboard, The Graveyard Train will be a thrilling, harrowing, bumpy joyride.
Article written by Craig Tuck.
Tags: The Drink The Devil and The Dance (2010) , The Graveyard Train