The Deadly Gentlemen
The Bastard Masterpiece
(Deadly Gentle, 2008)

If you can’t tell from the title of the album, the Deadly Gentlemen aren’t entirely serious on The Bastard Masterpiece. In their press kit they describe their sound with various hyperbolic statements like Woody Guthrie meets Eminem and the brain of Keith Richards in the body of Chris Thile (mandolin wunderkind of newgrass faves Nickel Creek). Most bands who make such boasts fall flat on their face once the music starts, but the Deadly Gentlemen deliver.

If the idea of combining hip-hop and bluegrass sounds far fetched, well, it is. The talking blues, an early African American song style that set mostly spoken words to a simple harmonic structure, was adopted by white musicians at least a hundred years ago, and it may be the precursor of rap. Pete Seeger and Tom Rush performed “The Original Talking Blues” in the early ’60s, but most rockers, if they know the form at all, probably heard it from Woody Guthrie’s “Talking Blues” or Bob Dylan’s “Talking World War III Blues” or “Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream.” Hip-hop took the spoken word traditions of the ghetto called “Toasting” or “the Dozens” to the dance floor and then into the heart of pop culture. But the twain never did meet, although there have been a few pop music examples of genre crossing. Johnny Cash’s “A Boy Named Sue” and AC/DC’s “Ain’t No Fun (Waiting Round to Be a Millionaire)” are talking blues as is the White Stripes’ “Ball and Biscuit”, but since the Stripes are a post hip-hop band it could just as easily be rap rock.

Erudite digressions aside, the Deadly Gentlemen have come up with a winning combination, a hip-hop and bluegrass hybrid that’ll leave your head spinning while it slaps a loony grin on yer face. The head Gentleman, and the twisted genius behind this project, is Gregory Liszt, who picks banjo with five fingers in a style some describe as having a hip-hop influence. He also sings/raps/talks the lyrics. Liszt is best known for his work with Crooked Still, a band that has come up with its own hard-to-define hyphenated newgrass-folk-old time-Americana style. He was also tapped by Springsteen to play in his Seeger Sessions Band. He wrote all the music and the jaw busting, tongue twisting, darkly poetic lyrics. He’s joined by stand-up bass player Samson Grisman (son of mandolin ace David), fiddler Michael Barnett, and mandolin picker Joshua Pinkham, who has played with Jim Lauderdale and is distantly related to A.P. Carter. The music they play is acoustic, and while it fits into the wider newgrass genre, it’s also influenced by rock, pop, folk, blues, and hip-hop.

“Working” is a bluesy bluegrass tune, with melodic hook from Barnett’s fiddle that sticks in your mind. Liszt’s vocal is not just rhythmic talking, but more expressive, like listing to the grumbling of a friend while sharing drinks in the living room. Liszt pulls off a neat trick in the lyric, complaining about work while telling you he’s not really complaining. “Work’s not bad and it’s not that tough / I’m not breaking my neck, or my back, or my balls in the rough,” he says, but he does capture the senseless feeling one often gets when they stop and ask themselves if they’re working to pay the rent so they can have a place to stay while they work to pay the next month’s rent. “When I Was a Cowboy” is a ghost story driven by Liszt’s clattering banjo, Barnett’s apocalyptic fiddling, and the driving rhythms of Grisman and Pinkham. Liszt’s violent, surrealistic spew of images pulls you into a confusing narrative that leaves you almost breathless at its conclusion. There’s an ancient Appalachian rattle to “The Spender of the Bender”, a bouncing, almost funk-like rhythm that details the result of a drunken binge with possibly the most poetic depiction of vomiting ever written. “The Demon Ether” takes the old-fashioned American murder ballad and gives it a new twist. The jilted dead lover comes back to haunt his paramour only to find that she looks through him as if he’s not there. How can you haunt someone who doesn’t believe in ghosts he seems to ask, while consumed in his own private hell. The music is deliberate and brooding, a slow pulse full of menace and heartache. But all is not grim. “Roll Me, Tumble Me” is a faintly ragtime ditty with playful fiddling and giddy mandolin work to support Liszt’s skewed musings on the pursuit of a lover, or at least a night of love. He accents his insistent pleading—“Be frigid to me, or be wild and fiery, heck, jump down turn around and wildly defile me”—with muted notes on the banjo full of glistening overtones.

It’s risky to title an album a masterpiece. You’re just asking to be shot down or sneered at, but the Deadly Gentlemen make good on their boast. This is indeed a low-key, genre-breaking masterpiece.

Listen: Various Tracks [at myspace.com]

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