A Fix Back East

I just came across this review of the new Tarbox CD and thought I'd share it. It's from the All Music Guide, and is the best description of "A Fix Back East" I've read.
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Four years ago, when the Tarbox Ramblers introduced their train wreck of swamp blues, hillbilly, gospel, and woolly folk, the North Mississippi Allstars, Black Keys, Fiery Furnaces, or that Detroit band with the funny clothes, weren't even blips on the screen. Now they're the competition. It's OK, it's a big world, and with A Fix Back East, the Tarbox Ramblers go down into the deep reaches of their frontman's collective American Gothic psyche, and dredge up the ghosts, the faded photographs, the myths and texts of a time that may never have existed in the popular consciousness. This is a much wilder record; yet its very rawness contains starkly beautiful textures that are drenched in sepia-toned images, and black and white newsreels from the focal point of the ravaged human heart. The album opens with a huge, R.L. Burnside-styled barroom record machine groove. Using the riff from "Honey Hush," and warping it all to hell, Michael Tarbox indulges his iconographic marriage of rural loneliness, backwater holiness, and steaming sex, which, immediately after is dragged through a drunkenly redemptive version of "Were You There (When They Crucified My Lord?)" where violins, electric guitars, and echoing drums from time immemorial try to match the grief and longing in Tarbox's convicted voice. But it's right back to hell in the band's caveman read of Dock Boggs' "Country Blues," with a roiling slide guitar all nasty and distorted, like it was calling from the devil's playground. And this is where it all starts. From the elegiac loss and shimmer of the title track, to the backwoods two-step of the American traditional song, "No Night There," to the murderous gutter blues of "Honey Babe," this is a slash and burn affair that holds it secrets close, and offers its dirty treasures abundantly and regally -- if the parades in Robert Frank's The Americans are your idea of majesty. Produced by Jim Dickinson, Paul Q. Kolderie, and Sean Slade, this is the banshee's howl after all the liquor is gone; it's the drunken, lascivious, preacher's moan when he's still in the whorehouse at seven a.m. on Sunday morning; a dying bluesman's final snarl at a world that's left him empty and broke, and a brokenhearted cowboy's last lament -- all rolled into one. ~ Thom Jurek, All Music Guide


A Masterpiece   May 8, 2004
By turns brooding, dreamy and explosive, "A Fix Back East" clearly draws on traditional music as a source of inspiration. But there's something else going on here that makes this album completely unique. Drenched in blues, these tracks have a noirish sensibility, akin in some ways to Wm. Burroughs's novel "Naked Lunch," Dassin's glorious "Night in the City," and landmark recordings like "White Light/White Heat" and "Tonight's the Night."

The comparison to books and movies, as well as to other CDs, is intentional: each of these cuts unfolds slowly, with the sprawling cinematic quality that's found throughout the album. And bandleader Michael Tarbox is a gifted songwriter, with verse after shimmering verse conveying an otherworldly sense of strangeness with compelling, at times anguished, immediacy. A few examples:

"Through the yawning railyard hear the lonesome brakeman cuss
And Jesus redeemer calling back through the dust;"
(Already Gone)

"Night falls, memory returns, I trace each hour that's passed
Forsaken loves call my name and claim me as their own at last...
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."
(A Fix Back East)

Other favorites on "A Fix Back East" are the haunted, yearning "Were You There?" and the jarring "Ashes to Ashes," which combines lyrical precision with a loose, seemingly improvised performance featuring some of the album's most powerful - and ominous - guitar playing. Tarbox also pays homage to his influences with his take of Dock Boggs's "Country Blues." It's a raucous guitar/drum assault featuring some of the darkest, and best, slide playing you'll hear anywhere.

I first learned about Tarbox Ramblers, and their new album, when I came across a description of its "grimy, thrilling noise" - an opinion I second. This raw, urgent CD will strike a chord with listeners who favor intensity and who are looking for something new.


An Explosive Masterpiece   March 31, 2004
6 out of 6 found this review helpful

By turns brooding, dreamy and explosive, "A Fix Back East" clearly draws on traditional music as a source of inspiration. But there's something else going on here that makes this album completely unique. Drenched in blues, these tracks have a noirish sensibility, akin in some ways Wm. Burroughs's novel "Naked Lunch," Dassin's "Night in the City," and landmark recordings like "White Light/White Heat" and "Tonight's the Night."

The comparison to books and movies, as well as to other CDs, is intentional: each of these cuts unfolds slowly, with a sprawling cinematic quality that's found throughout the album. And bandleader Michael Tarbox is a killer songwriter, with verse after shimmering verse conveying an otherworldly sense of strangeness with compelling, at times anguished, immediacy. A few examples:

"Through the yawning railyard hear the lonesome brakeman cuss
And Jesus redeemer calling back through the dust;"
(Already Gone)

"Night falls, memory returns, I trace each hour that's passed
Forsaken loves call my name and claim me as their own at last...
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."
(A Fix Back East)

Other favorites on "A Fix Back East" are the haunted, yearning "Were You There?" and the jarring "Ashes to Ashes," which combines lyrical precision with a loose, seemingly improvised performance featuring some of the album's most powerful - and ominous - guitar playing. Tarbox also pays homage to his influences with his take of Dock Boggs's "Country Blues." It's a raucous guitar/drum assault featuring some of the meanest slide playing you'll hear anywhere.

I first learned about Tarbox Ramblers, and their new album, when I came across a description of its "grimy, thrilling noise" - an opinion I second. This raw, urgent CD will strike a chord with listeners who favor intensity and who are looking for something new.


Second-rate No. Miss. All-Stars   March 17, 2004
Craig Weatherby (Waltham, MA USA)
7 out of 27 found this review helpful

Despite being produced by the legendary Jim Dickinson--father to the brothers who lead the North Mississippi All-Stars--this CD is as disappointingly tiresome/enervating as the first Tarbox CD. The hype is overdone, folks.
I admire the apparent intent (to update the country blues a la the North Mississippi All-Stars, but with more "depth" and "art"), but cannot applaud the mostly annoying results.