Black Happy Day: "How They Weep And Moan!"

An uncomfortable description for an unnerving song: the slough shed or pooling in the center of the bed after an unholy night between Neko Case and Michael Gira, In the Garden of Ghostflowers is an album of re-imagined traditionals and lucid, gothic folk, a collection of unashamed melodrama and starkly creepy Americana backwash. “How They Weep and Moan!” is maybe the most overt representation of the lot, marrowed banjo clipping over Tara Vanflower’s multi-tracked howls. Timothy Renner speaks in gutturals, intoning indulgent Tom Waits lyrics for those too caught up in Vanflower’s spectral backdrop to make much of a fuss. On top of Renner, she chatters in infantile cackles, “…wail for the dead! We wail for the dead!” Renner and his banjo are sandwiched between her thighs, between luscious coos and farting speech impediments. Because this is sensual in the crassest of connotations, teeming with maggots, sinew and portent and all.

The rest of Ghostflowers creaks and crawls in both directions away from “How They Weep,” the disc’s tiny centerpiece. It’s a harrowing cusp, but a brief and determined inculcation of all experimentation, tone, reverence, and paranoia that seems to define Black Happy Day. Vanflower and Renner, part of the burgeoning Silber family, got a startling chemistry at work here, something that, while contradictory and unsettling, reaches a strange accessibility in simplicity alone. There aren’t many bones in play, and god knows what a “saintbanjo” is, but for every snaggletoothed, evangelical attempt at a swamp dirge, Black Happy Day backs it with fantastically wounded intrigue. Sometimes the conceit pays, sometimes it doesn’t, and sometimes the difference between the two is enough to spark a bit of heavy devotion.