Elvis Perkins In Dearland

We Say...

Review by J. Edward Keyes

On the first Elvis Perkins record, the end of the world came quietly. There was a puff of smoke, a few bare guitar chords and a bleak, bleated reference to Ash Wednesday. Despite occasional touches of sweetness — the swaying lullaby "While You Were Sleeping" chief among them — Ash Wednesday was funeral music, brittle ballads built to be played graveside. Near the end of Elvis Perkins in Dearland, Perkins, carousing like a drunkard at the center of a Memorial Day Parade, hoists his voice above the blaring brass and booming bass drums and bellows, "I know you told me once and again/ Doesn't mean that we won't be friends/ When Doomsday rears her lovely head again." It sounds like a manic rearranging of "Sloop John B," all stomp and holler and woozy melody. This time, it seems, we're going out with a bang.

That Perkins' second album shares its name with his touring band is no coincidence: Dearland is, in every way, bigger, bolder and — quite literally — brassier than its predecessor. That's a good thing: for all of its simple beauty, Ash Wednesday occasionally felt too spare, too stifled. Dearland, by contrast, is a brawler: the band plows forward at Perkins' first call to "Sweep up!" and stays oom-pahing in the background throughout. And while Dearland is still plagued by a sense of onrushing darkness — in the breathless "I Heard Your Voice in the Dresden" Perkins is pursued by the painful memory of a woman from his past — the mood this time is celebratory rather than mournful. "1, 2, 3, goodbye," Perkins moans near the album's close, "I love you more in death than I ever could in life." And then the timpani swells, the strings come in, and Perkins cries, "It's nice to meet you! Goodbye!" It's a eulogy and victory, hundreds of bodies doing the rhumba in order to shake off these mortal coils. The message is clear: if we're all going down together, the least we can do is enjoy the trip.