Savage Excursions - Thoughts About A Fix Back East

The Tarbox Ramblers welcome you to their second CD, A Fix Back East, a stark firestorm of Michael Tarbox originals. Elegant and nerve-endingly raw, the album charts the thickets and narcotic backwaters of need, desire and regret - a country where longing and loss mingle in an undertow as threatening as it compelling.

The incendiary "Already Gone" kicks things off.  Listen to the collision of Tarbox's seething guitar and Howie Ferguson's churning wall of drums, and witness the birth of a terrible beauty, a shivering beast peering into a strange world for the first time. The song's lyrics, brutal and sublime, touch on solitude, sex and redemption in a laconic shorthand that demonstrates Tarbox's mastery of the blues idiom:

Baby sweet baby, oh baby you look so fine
Baby sweet baby, oh sweet baby you look so fine
You make the holy ghost shiver up and down my spine

Through the yawning railyard, hear the lonesome brakeman cuss
Through the yawning railyard, hear the lonesome brakeman cuss
And Jesus Redeemer calling back through the dust

Lost in his reverie, the singer channels yearning and a displaced sense of past, traveling a million miles before turning to the lover who waits for him in their bed. It's left for the music to say what he cannot; awesome and self-consuming, this fierce, fiery juggernaut shudders as it forges its way through the night sky, trailing ash and ruin in its wake before disappearing forever.

Surveying the lost districts of heaven, and the blast-furnace precincts of hell, these songs trace a world gone wrong where - just barely - the imagination's transformative power remains a flickering hope. In the CD's title track, a wary protagonist hesitantly comes to terms with his lover's infidelity. Consumed by his attempts to improvise a game face for the world collapsing around him, he has little reason to believe his troubles will end any time soon. Yet, from the start, Tarbox follows his character with understated empathy, hinting as the song concludes that he's found an opening to something like peace of mind:

Outside the air is sweet, the water so still
Honeysuckle's on the vine
People say there's a heaven somewhere
I know I'll make it mine

His fears offset by a sense of the night's lush redemptive possibilities, the singer's respite is a first, tentative, shift beyond his dilemma. Intruding on his assumptions like a half-remembered dream, more sensed than discerned, his release is barely understood but also, darkly, fraught with promise.

If “A Fix Back East” shimmers in its play of shadow and light, other songs here move through more primal realms, gushing from ancient springs where necessity, unquestionably, is all that matters - or at least all that remains. Check out "Honey Babe,” a primitive blues about both betrayal and controlling a world where betrayal's a fact. Or the murder tale "Ashes to Ashes," whose relentless trajectory excludes any notion of free will. Its fatalism suggests a darkness beyond human intervention; more chilling yet is its straightforward narration, which offers little comfort in its refusal to pass judgement on the harrowing events it describes. It's a time honored approach - think back through the years to poker-faced hillbilly renditions of "Pretty Polly" - that loses none of its power in this most contemporary treatment of an ancient theme.

Savagely unsentimental, the music on A Fix Back East often seems a bulwark against the pain its lyrics describe. Grief - at loss, at having to recognize the unthinkable - is never far from its surface. Shot through with tenderness and longing, casting a backward glance despite its suggestion that to do so only invites disaster, this music looks forward because there is no place else to turn. A first foray after the flood, it's a reluctant coming to terms with the fact that, the worst over, much is gone forever and rebuilding must now begin.