North Carolina-native Jenks Miller is a bit too otherworldly to ever be pegged as a regional musician. Still, he seems to have the South in his bones. Not the false sheen associated with the so-called new South, mind youwith its tech startups and gallery spaces colonizing the re-purposed red brick warehouses or the hip speakeasies and fussy artisanal coffeehouses. Not that place, which Miller might tell you, is being built on less than solid ground. The Carolina beneath it and beyond it. The primordial South. Still, Miller is hard to avoid in the cultural hotbed of the NC Triangle music scene. In addition to playing guitar in the beloved local rust rock unit, Mount Moriah, Miller has released a run of spidery electric guitar soli records under his own name. And for the last decade, he has helmed the experimental Horseback, whose humid, heavy drones conjure like nothing else the suffocating, insect hum of the warm southern night. In recent years, hes been playing out with his purgatorial jam outfit, Rose Cross NCan exercise, as their vaguely alchemical name indicates, in the swamp psychedelia of the Southern occult. (A handful of Rose Crosss performancesimprobably mapping the space between the two Deads: Grateful Dead and Dead Care available at Jenkss Bandcamp page.) Blues from WHAT is the first recording under the Rose Cross NC moniker to capture the searing sound of the touring bands labyrinthine live performances. This is somewhat ironic, as Blues is essentially a solo album. Aside from Rose Cross keyboardist Elysse Millers welcome shadings on the Grendel Drone Commander throughout the affair, Blues from WHAT still mostly finds Jenks Miller conjuring alone. One wouldnt necessarily know it, though. The proceedings are as densely tangled as anything in their live set. Blues from WHATs tremulous opening track, Reaching Never Reaching intertwines feedback and keening recorder and church organ in an ever-rising salutation. This bright ascent is cut short by the seamless transition into the astonishing Yellowtail (Blues from WHAT): the drums storm in, and Miller lets loose with a snarling guitar line. The heavenly organ falls in line behind the riff while pentecostal tambourines rattle with the rite. Miller intones plagues and portents from afar: "Black blood! Boiling mud! Crawling lava!/ Now you see. The music fractures. And I feel the spirit come . . . over and over, in some consummation of revival. The track that follows, From Nothing to WHAT is a lumbering electric processional, snaking its way deeper and deeper into the metaphysical backcountry. I know this place./ I feel it./Past not even pasta scrap of Faulkner in the lyrics, in case one has forgotten just where we are. On the far side of this ordeal lies the radiant raga-like introspection Scrying in Water, which comprises the entire second half of Blues from WHAT. Scrying, of course, is the art of divination by crystal. And here Miller gazes into the rings on ring
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- Format Detail: LP w/ DL
- Genre: Rock
- Format: Vinyl
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