It’s fitting that Th’ Legendary Shack Shakers final album in the Tent Trilogy (Believe, Pandelirium, Swampblood ), and likely their last on North Carolina label Yep Roc, explores the theme of death in the crazy world that is the American South. It is also fitting that Swampblood marks a return to the dirty Southern blues rock that was this band’s hallmark sound back before they ever left Bloodshot Records. Turning to the comfortable and familiar is something we all do when faced with the finality of death, and the Shack Shakers are no different.
Colonel J.D. Wilkes’ brand of “bump in the night” songwriting gives justice to the South in a way that few other songwriters can. With his songs, Wilkes explores the dark, but he does it with a romantic bend, showing us the things about the dark that we love to hate, and indeed, the things we hate to love. He realizes, as so many good writers have, that it’s only when we’re lost in the dark that we truly meet ourselves. The Colonel doesn’t just write songs, he takes you on a Wonka like tour of the truth, pulling back the curtain to show us how we can be in the throes of religious fervor, sideshow terror, and finally, death.
Swampblood is as much a celebration of influences though, as it is a document of the dreams and the reality that populated the South of Wilkes’ childhood. The runaway train that is guitarist David Lee is finally free here to run right off the tracks, destroying everything in his path, urged on through it all by the frenetic hillbilly drumming of Brett Whitacre. And the whole album is brought back to the light, anchored in reality by the consistent play of bassist Mark Roberston. The music thunders along, the album itself clocking in at just over thirty-two minutes, referencing Hank Williams (Hellwater), CCR (Swampblood) and the ghosts of old bluesmen with distant eyes and haunted strings (The Deadenin’).
Swampblood takes the listener through a day in a Southern Gothic nightmare world, forcing the ears and the eyes open, not allowing them to ignore what they are experiencing. Then the sun rises on a new day (Bright Sunny South) reminding us that light will eventually shine in even the darkest of places. The Tent Trilogy is about a man facing the truth of a life down South, learning to love the twisting and the snarling things, and embracing the life-affirming joy of terror. This album marks the funeral and subsequent wake for that man, so the only question before the Shack Shakers and Colonel Wilkes now is, “What does the afterlife hold?”
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