Dusty Mason — Ahab's Revenge - Hot Tears, Cold Ocean

Dusty Mason is Ben Purscell, a rural Pennsylvanian stone mason by trade, who has recently taken to carving headstones. Ahab's Revenge - Hot Tears, Cold Ocean is undoubtedly a more refined and cohesive album than his previous work with the Grave Cowboys. Their lone album, Dead Man Shoes includes some fine songs, and listened to in pieces works well enough. In the end, though, it comes across like so many first albums do, as an unfinished work in progress, an artist, or in this case a band, figuring out how to navigate their way through the recording studio. Dusty Mason on his own sounds relaxed away from the confines of the hard-lined clock tick-ery of the studio, having recorded Ahab's Revenge... at home. With no outside intervention, these recordings are almost like diary entries, personal reminiscences of daily events and thoughts. Not that these songs aren't well though out or, if you'll pardon the pun, carefully hewn. It's just that Dusty's personality is indelibly imprinted onto each one. It would be easy to lazily file this music under alternative folk or country, and though there's certainly a little of both folk and country elements, it doesn't fit neatly into either category. It's distinctly American music, seen through a dirty lens, slightly out of skew.

Right off the bat, the opening track Port Manteau Blues reminds a bit of Tom Waits, because of its shuffling take on the blues, complete with spiky guitar embellishment. It's a tinge though, not full-on, or even conscious mimicry. It's a telling sign of things to come that portmanteau is a term for the merging of two words, which take on the meaning of each. And the possibility of double metaphors emerging from a single word isn't lost on Dusty. This isn't exactly Thomas Pynchon territory, or Finnegan's Wake, it's not all that "out there", or cryptic. But there is abundant poetic wordplay, sometimes leaning toward the absurd, which in all cases renders the songs three-dimensional.

No particular unifying theme emerges, but there's more than one reference to cars and trucks. Travels With Charlie is about a caffeine fueled ride, wherein the narrator relates " I pass you on the left/ you pass me on the right/ Exit up ahead we could stop for a fight/ Black coffee and a fold up map/ We're gettin' there on time /Or else we're gettin' there in time". It's a catchy song which runs the border between pop and country, with a little bit of crud thrown in. Kingwood Mule and Kingwood Mule Redux are odes to a "bad mother truck drivin' man", who will do anything to get the job done. The two are completely different musically. The latter is another catchy tune, but this time Dusty combines disparate elements seemingly scored from post-punk and honky tonk. The former runs as close to convention as any tune here, an appropriately barrelling country tune with some pedal steel, oddly enough, imported from Scandinavia via an Internet friend. The "car and truck" references seem to point to the fact that man is in a big goddamn rush, maybe too much so. The time to smell the roses has passed these characters by long ago, and though admirable for getting things done, they're filled with tension, rage even, toward their fellow man, who get in their way. What makes these songs appealing is that they are delivered from a satirist's eye view, and luckily that trend is spread throughout Ahab's Revenge.

There's everything from the Cracker-esque title track to the folky Animal Instincts, which includes some fine fingerpicked guitar. Two of the best tracks on the album have to do with domestic affairs; Trial By Fire is a love song with minimal electric guitar backing, and is clever enough both lyrically and musically to avoid a whit of sappiness. The Down Time is as timely as you can get. It's story of a man who turns to drinking out of boredom, or perhaps bitterness, because of, as you might guess, too much down time, and not enough work. But what elevates it is the humility that Dusty manages to evoke from the theme. The character ends up pissing off his wife as a result of the previous night's drinking, and clearly, he laments it. Like the rest of the album, the music is simple, clear and uncluttered, which is a good fit. Dusty's got something to say, and it wouldn't be right to draw the listener away with needless embellishment. His voice possesses a folksy timbre, that of a devious everyman, the kind who has interesting stories to tell.