Timber Timbre:Creep On Creepin’ On

Record Label: Arts & Crafts

6/10 dropps

In 2005, Taylor Kirk (previously with Codename Laurentians) set out to carve his name in the bark of the dense musical forest.  Along the way he picked up some flint (Mika Posen) and some steel (Simon Trottier), which sparked Timber Timbre.  Their name stems from a “timber-framed cabin,” which partly served as Kirk’s studio, where they recorded their bucolic debut album, Cedar Shakes, on the fray of Bobcaygeon, Ontario. Since Timber Timbre was Kirk’s brainchild, he structured the direction of the project hesitantly melding blues, rock, and folk, which were indigenous influences he picked up from Led Zeppelin, The Animals, Son House and Leroy Carr.  His uncertainty to incorporate blues patterns into his music was not due to lack of originality or perfunctory haste, but from his reflection that blues was such a pure form of musical expression. He decided he did not want to back himself into a corner and compartmentalize his sound to the blues genre. In a couple years’ time, Cedar Shakes (2006) and Medicinal (2007) were released and embodied a mature and heartfelt snapshot of a musically inclined widow in the woods playing blues-folk to his dog named Schmaltz.

Having had time to mull over his folk-a-billy sound, in 2009, Kirk desalinated his salty taste to sonically visit (and some may think plunder) the vein of Ryan Gosling’s spooky doo-wop effort, Dead Man’s Bones. Even though some of Timber Timbre’s early catalog incorporated somber elements to it, their self-titled release usurped somber with “Demon Host”, which darkened the stage for Creep On Creepin’ On [2011 Arts & Crafts]. The new release appears as if Kirk derailed the spirit of Cedar Shakes and Medicinal to board an empty, cobwebbed-cornered train headed for Spook Haven to eyeball Nosferatu on a cold cult classics night. The audacity of the album has birthed a new future for the act and put them in the top 10 running for the Canadian 2011 Polaris Music Prize.

Just like hipster clothes are overtly borrowed fashions from the 50’s and onward, Taylor Kirk’s noir pop borrows from dance-step rhythms and progressions like the 1954 hit by The Penguins, “Earth Angel” (popularized by Marvin Berry and the Starlighters in Back to the Future). The album’s permanent setting is a Halloween-hued dusk on a full-mooned night. “All I need is some sunshine” in “Black Water,” vocalizes a blatant binary of the album – darkness as the absence of light, a glimmer of harmony in the midst of cacophony. From an analogical perspective, Cedar Shakes is to recessive, as Creep On Creepin’ On is to dominant. The former sound conjured a crooning soul in the distance, whereas the Penderecki-laced augmentation in “Obelisk” and “Swamp Magic” conjures a Poe-sized poltergeist up to no good in community graveyards.  The vein-like bass and melancholy melody in “Lonesome Hunter” saunters back and forth from E to B for the duration of the song; and there is a swingy brass and stringed breakdown in the lyrical force of “Do I Have Power” that should not be left unheard.

Overall, the strong effort is more orchestral then your typical album from an indie folkster, and ends with an instrumental track (Godspeed-sounding noise in the background) mapping Taylor Kirk’s final knells. Though the album is richly organic, the fact that it is full of noir-dependent instrumentation and haunted house creaking may prove to cast a holiday-specific spell on the album. And to face the mirror, although “Bad Ritual”, like all the other tracks, commands with ominous layering, garners melodic affluence, and underscores Kirk’s aptly hollow timbre, the album is overshadowed by its theatrical nature, as it seems to need a complimentary sideshow (similar to how Wait’s The Black Rider was criticized). If this is the ambitious future for the outfit then they are going to need to pick out a few bones to use as steaks in the ground because the Creep On Creepin’ On tent needs help standing up on its own.

by Zach Frimmel

Check out Timber Timbre’s “Black Water” tune below.