decker.
Broken Belts, Broken Bones
Sedona, AZ
“Dark times on the prairie”
Brandon Decker, who has been performing and recording as decker. (all lower case and punctuated), delivered his newborn son in his kitchen shortly after returning home from a tour. I wish, for the woman who birthed this child in a room she will prepare food in, that this wasn’t such a good metaphor for his music; which is as romantic, dramatic, intense, primitive and harrowing as a birth in a kitchen in Arizona (technically, this is a simile). Broken Belts, Broken Bones creates its own furrow somewhere between Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska and Gillian Welch’s Time (The Revelator) with mandolins, sparse accompaniment, narcotic tempos and stray harmonies (I will say that the sing-along “Porch Choir” reminds me of a Steinbeckian “Sun is Out” by the Apples in Stereo). Like Sigur Ros or Woody Guthrie, decker.’s music begs to be compared to the geography from whence it came. Broken Belts, Broken Bones’ sparseness recalls the open, eternal spaces the American frontier once possessed. (Mescal Porch Records)
Engineered by Ed Barattini