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atmospheric bluesy death-raga
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about
The North Carolina-based songwriter and guitarist Morgan Geer lost his father this past year. Geer, (a sometimes member of always-weird-Americana outfit Freakwater) who performs and records under the name Drunken Prayer, pays haunting and spaced-out tribute to his dad this Father’s Day with the release of “Electric Daddyland,” an atmospheric bluesy death-raga collage that repurposes and sets to music numerous voicemail messages that Geer’s father left for him on his phone as he declined due to Parkinson’s Disease.
“Electric Daddyland” is both a departure from the sturdy, melodic, wry and deep songs that Geer crafted for 2020’s Cordelia Elsewhere, and a continuation of that album’s meditations on home and displacement.
With slide guitar, organ, and collaged layers of voice, the end result is a brooding but mellow cinematic outing that evokes the ominous feedback-and-driftwood aesthetic of Neil Young’s Dead Man soundtrack. The accompanying video, with its vast expanses of the American West and the dreamy lull of graffitied boxcars, boxcars, boxcars, gyrating skeletal Statue of Liberty bobble-head figures, and flickering reflections presents a visual analog to the music. There’s something Whitmanesque about it all: the particle subsumed into the cosmic swirl, the ineffable communion of souls, the beautiful, crass open road. “Electric Daddyland” is like a film score for a road movie of the mind, one about memory and the passage of time, the slow erosion of self into the big slop of overarching nothingness. This is music that could have emerged from a highly blissed-out biker bar or at a swampy ashram. Or maybe something tape manipulators like Steve Reich or Alvin Lucier would have done in a more sentimental mood.
It’s hard not to get a little choked up when you hear Geer’s dad sign off towards the end of this 16-minute excursion with “Ok, love to everyone, bye-bye.”
- John Adamian, RELIX
credits
released June 20, 2021
Compiled and edited by Morgan Geer
Morgan Geer - guitars, harmonica, organ
Patrick Hamilton - synth
Leon Kern - vocals
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