Muerte Pan Alley – Clunk & Sputter
Artist: Muerte Pan Alley
James G. Carlson
Posted On February 6, 2015
0
Clunk & Sputter is the debut album by Canadian roots trio Muerte Pan Alley, a project featuring guitarist Bob Keelaghan and drummer Jason Woolley (Agnostic Mountain Gospel Choir) and bassist Rob Oxoby (formerly of The Mutilators). If you are familiar with Agnostic Mountain Gospel Choir, then you will almost certainly recognize elements of their sound in Muerte Pan Alley’s Clunk & Sputter material. There are a handful of styles at work here, including gritty blues pickin’, folky mountain banjo string acrobatics, stomp and crash percussion, off-the-rails country strums, upright pluck and thump, and unruly junkyard roots rock bits, to list a few.
For Clunk & Sputter, the band wrote and recorded twelve Muerte Pan Alley originals. And there are a number of standouts, including “All I Wants,” “Existential Blues,” “Dance of the Yallites,” “This Is the Soul of a Man” (a little Blind Willie Johnson reference in this song title, perhaps?), and “Rich Man’s Grave” (see the video attached to this review to listen to this one).
Fans who have been waiting for new material since Agnostic Mountain Gospel Choir’s Ten Thousand (2008) and Agnostic-Phibes Rhythm & Blood Conspiracy’s Campfire Tales (2012) will no doubt be pleased with Muerte Pan Alley’s Clunk & Sputter. It is available on the artists’ label S.A.P. Recordings.
