I am a fan of what some call Gothic Americana. Dark Country, sometimes with an underying sense of humour, but that is not some essential.
It has always been in country music with its murder ballads and songs like Long Dark Veil and Leon Payne's magnificent Psycho (check out Elvis Costello's version. The modern take may have started with artists like Nick Cave exploring Johnny Cash's dark side and its trail runs through Nick Cave, The Handsome Family, 16 Horsepower, Willard Grant Conspiracy and probably my favourite Jim White.
Sweet Anhedonia
I should have known you'd be back
With your sickle and shawl
Your dreams dressed in black
How does it feel
To feel nothing at all?
Nothing at all
If that is not dark enough for you you can also try Appalachian Book of the Dead
There's a sinkhole fallen from the cold grey sky
Where they scraped that trooper off the highway side
Two runaway convicts, kids on dope they said
Cops flooded out the holler dragged the river still
They never found them boys and I doubt they will
Just another lonesome chapter
In the Appalachian Book of the Dead
Where you gonna go when you can't go home
Where you gonna go? Where you gonna go?
Blood calls to blood bone cleaves to bone
Where you gonna go when you can't go home?
Winter came early the cold wind blew
And my grandma painted her porch haint blue
That night in Ammit County when the corn moon turned blood red
But something cold is stirring at the bottom of the creek
Where that little boy drowned back in '63
And the ink is running over
In the Appalachian Book of the Dead
Buckshot rattling in a garbage pail
A sliver of truth dug into every tale
A weeping angel painted on rusted shed
The dead hate the living but what do they know?
Just little white crosses on a county road
But they're writing out the ledger
In the Appalachian Book of the Dead
It is not all doom and gloom though, the reflective I've Got Everything I've Ever Wanted that seems to show that Ben has got a hold of his Anhedonia or it as least in remission.
I took life by the hand and I gave it some kind of a whirl
Just another left foot walking through a right shoe world.........
......I used to watch through the windshield
At the coming of the night
Now I'm sitting in the kitchen
Laughing at the morning light
