Music Post: William Elliott Whitmore May 29
Animals In The Dark
If you haven’t heard William Elliott Whitmore before, you really ought to give his new album, Animals in the Dark, a listen to. He’s an old soul in a not-so-old body with a voice that makes him sound decades older than he is. He’s been compared to Tom Waits many a time. His style has been described as Folk, Country, Alt-Country, Punk, and Soul. He definitely sings with a lot of soul, has a punk attitude, and musically sounds a lot like folk, playing a lone acoustic guitar or banjo.
I just started listening to him recently, but he has been around for a while. I haven’t had the chance to see him live yet, but hopefully sometime after he gets back from his tour in Europe I’ll be able to catch him somewhere.
Animals in the Dark is a politically charged album which is pretty self evident on tracks like “Mutiny”, “Old Devils” and “Johnny Law”. If that isn’t your thing, don’t let that deter you, there really is some great music on this album. If you like this one, be sure to check out “Songs of the Blackbird”, I’m not sure if I like it more than “Animals”, but it certainly has grown on me since I snagged it from the iTunes store. That purchase, btw, marks my first purchase of music from the iTunes store, now that it isn’t DRM’d and I can use play it anywhere, I no longer have a good reason to not buy my music there. I still am a little annoyed by the lack of mp3 support, but being able to purchase and download directly on my iPhone really seems to make up for that.
As Whitmore syas, “I don’t want to be set, I just want to be free.”
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My favorite Alkaline Trio album is “Maybe I’ll Catch Fire.” It has a lot of catchy tunes that are somewhat dark and comic in nature. The song “F* You, Aurora” about a town in Illinois named Aurora in which there was a bad car accident that took the life of one of the band members friend’s. It includes the lyric s “…And although it’s all my fault, The blaming myself had to come to an end. So I say:F*** you Aurora, you took my only friend. You won’t catch me behind the wheel, Of a Chrysler ever again.” Matt Skiba has a flair for good lyrics.
Other albums I would recommend by the Trio include “From Here to Infirmary” and “Goddammit”. “From Here to Infirmary” is definitely more pop-punkish than the other two, it has some better production values, and was their first album to get any real airplay. It is still pretty funny in that dark humor kind of way and so definitely worth a listen to.
On the other hand, if you want to listen to an example of what Mash-Up artistry really is take a listen to “Night Ripper”. This album combines riffs and samples from a huge variety of songs, from Elton John and Cyndi Lauper to 2 Live Crew and Eminem, into one cohesive collection of actual musical noise. In my opinion it is really a work of genius that can only be fully explained by listening to it. In this album he takes all those great samples and instead of putting them together with random noise, incorporates them into actual songs. I’m pretty sure I said that he wasn’t a musician, but anyone who can write songs like this has got to be classified as a musician, don’t you think?