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"Bad Ritual"
"Creep on Creepin' on"
When my brother and I were young we used to always get a kick out of scaring ourselves, and each other. We would intentionally fool ourselves into thinking things were more sinister than they actually were and would hide from one another, lurking in the shadows, waiting for the perfect moment of silence to burst out and send the other off screaming. We've both always been fascinated with everything related to horror: the films; the scores; the sound effects - all of it.
When we got a little older, we found an old tape of spooky haunted house noises that was full of cauldrons bubbling, witches cackling, werewolves howling, and victims screaming. It was a decade old and a little cheesy, but there were times when it had the potential to cause our skin to crawl. Since we were weird kids, we naturally listened to it all the time. I remember sitting in his truck late one night listening to that tape and thinking to myself how amazing it would be if someone could use the sounds we both feared and loved as the backdrop of an actual album. Timber Timbre's Creep on Creepin' on is that album - a fully realized childhood dream (or nightmare, rather) come to life.
Helmed by multi-instrumentalist Taylor Kirk, Timber Timbre's roots are in stripped down, bleak, and eerie folk and blues. A shift in sound occurred in 2009 when Canadian music visionaries Kevin Drew (of Broken Social Scene) and Jeffrey Remedios signed Timber Timbre to their label, Arts & Crafts Production, just prior to the release of their larger sounding self-titled third album. With the saxophone support of musical helping-hand and Arcade Fire side man Colin Stetson; Timber Timbre's Taylor Kirk, Simon Trottier, and Mika Posen set out to create an even larger and more atmospheric portrait of swampy and sinister Americana. The result: the bubbling and brimming starkness of 2011's Creep on Creepin' on.
Breaking away from his earlier Randy Newman delivery and adopting a more snarl-and-warble '50s rock 'n' roll sound more akin to Jerry Lee Lewis, Taylor Kirk has a swagger on this album that was missing before. His stutter-to-smooth flow compliments the down tempo doo-wop key strokes in the albums hypnotic stand out "Woman". The folk twang and screaming samples in "Too Old to Die Young" give way to Kirk's newly found growling bravado to create a sinister anthem that slowly unfolds into a bluesy love song in it's latter string-laden half. This track embodies the tone of the album, mixing sounds in a bewildered state of subdued mania.
There is a haunting sense of forlorn fearfulness within Creep on Creepin' on, which is expressed on both "Woman" and "Too Old to Die Young", but most overtly in the zombie romance "Lonesome Hunter", which sounds strikingly like Arcade Fire in the Funeral years. Falling back on the throaty Newman delivery from their earlier albums, Taylor Kirk slowly sputters "Sparrows at your window/ Starlings at your door/ Magpies wherever we go/ Is it blackbirds forever more?" in a brooding aw-shucks fashion.
The sonics of Creep on Creepin' on rely deeply on atmosphere and negative space, maintaining a contrast between harrowing cacophony and murky orchestrations - displayed perfectly in the albums creepy instrumental intermissions "Obelisk" and "Swamp Magic". The addition of saxophonist Colin Stetson aids in this increase in foreboding as well, making Timber Timbre's blues a bit darker. With the addition of the sax the outro to the sullen love sick "Black Water" is made more dismal, the ending to the title track "Creep on Creeping on" is made more desolate, and the intro to "Woman" is made more ominous.
The group developed the name Timber Timbre by combining the fact that their earliest recordings were made in a lumber cabin (timber) and the music term for distinguishing instruments and tone quality or tone color (timbre). Decidedly, Timber Timbre's tone color would have to be the blood-red-blues. These tracks are as sorrowful as they are sinister and they embody my childhood memories of the almost gleeful terror that sounds can elicit.
"Woman" music video
"Black Water" music video