The Dirt Daubers:
Wake Up, Sinners!
( Colonel Knowledge)
[Rating: 3.5 stars]
Adopting the name of a small worker wasp is oddly appropriate for The Dirt Daubers, whose sophomore record, Wake Up, Sinners!, is music for the working man, built on ramshackle folk, traditional bluegrass, dusty theatric ragtime and deconstructed hot jazz. Split between Nashville and Paducah – bassist Mark Robertson resides in Music City while main songwriters J.D. Wilkes and wife Jessica call Kentucky home – they made their eponymous first record in 2009 – a label-less, homegrown affair that came from songs dual frontman J.D. had been keeping in his pocket, some dating back nearly a decade, that weren’t the appropriate spirit for his first baby, The Legendary Shack Shakers.
The follow-up was done up properly on Shack Shakers/Dirt Daubers label Colonel Knowledge, though recording in an East Nashville basement was not without rustic charms. There they banged out 13 originals and remakes that sound as if a marching band traipsing through the backwoods was lured to a mountain shack by a bunch of hobos where they got liquored up, raised the dead and held a barn dance.
It opens strong with “Wayfaring Stranger,” the old standard recycled seemingly as many times as it is years old, delivered by J.D. in a rusty timbre. Differentiating between others’ work and their own is difficult as they emulate the style of the lost and yellowed classics (like J.D.’s messy, stripped-down march “She and Us Pets,” inspiration for which came to him in a dream), and give a nod to the south, “where it’s as dirty as can be.”
Jessica shares vocals, and hers are worn, but lush and subtly changing from track to track. They become warm on the love strain “Say Darlin’ Say,” comic as she cringes at the taste of domesticity in “Single Girl” and foreboding in the snarling ragtime shuffle “Get Outta My Way.” “I came back from the dead just to hold the hand of my baby/I don’t mean maybe/get outta my way,” she snaps amid a trilling harmonica.
Horn sections built in with kazoo add a resourceful touch, like on “The Devil Gets His Due,” and the width ranges from more classic bluegrass (the beautiful banjo/mandolin-driven melody of “Angel Along the Tracks”) to the exotic and shady “Be Not Afraid,” a ghostly tale and street dance that drives home the line, “I was told a long, long time ago/the boys don’t like the good girls no more.” But it’s the title track that feels like the album’s focal point – a rousing, clunky spiritual led by a bleating harmonica’s inflection and J.D.’s pinched vocals.
Wake Up, Sinners! embraces the slapped-together aesthetic, but it’s irresistible in its rawness and imperfection – equal parts digging down to the aged roots and the band putting down their own. The gospel and folk standards are renewed with a piss and vinegar unique to the trio: like a stray dog that bristles when you get too close, Jessica spits rants with a chin-raised defiance, and every line coming from J.D. sounds like a warning. As far as nomadic, hand-crafted odes to the past are concerned, this ragged, surly songbook paints a pretty picture for the leather tramps.