'Me and the Devil' by Mortal Prophets
John Beckmann, the engine driver of the Mortal Prophets, is another man who listens to and interprets classic American music, especially the blues, as something that can be at once primal and postmodern, solid and surreal.
The Prophets’ first long player, Me and the Devil, emphasizes the postmodernism and surrealism, with Beckmann handing off his songs to Irish producer and player William Declan Lucey, whose limited additions to and subtractions from Beckmann’s recordings deliberately fracture the glass under which Beckmann has framed the music.
Clarity can emerge between the fractures, though: Dana Colley, late of the beatnik-bent indie-rock band Morphine, blows spiky saxophone holes in the squeezebox-simulating synthesizers of one more version of “Baby, Please Don’t Go,” while Lucey’s fellow Irish musician, Aoibheann Carey-Philpott, testifies to her truth while Beckmann largely and wisely stays behind her for the gospel favorite “Lord I’m the True Vine.”
When Beckmann steps forward and Carey-Philpott steps back for “Soul of a Man,” it becomes evident that the Mortal Prophets are cribbing from the same unholy passages pored over by more experienced gutter priests, including Nick Cave, Beck (when he’s in the mood) and Mark Lanegan.
And Lanegan’s soul, departed from his body in February 2022, isn’t the only ghost hovering too close to Beckmann, because “In the Pines” is a pulsing take on “Where Did You Sleep Last Night?,” famously, indelibly performed not just by the legendary Lead Belly but also by bluegrass giant Bill Monroe and by Nirvana.
Beckmann’s vocals, deliberately dilapidated and constantly wandering away from the melody, match the cool but not the heat Lanegan so often achieved. With Me and the Devil, Beckmann turns Satan and Americana into constructs, and the Mortal Prophets ponder concepts more than they live inside the messiness of ancestral art.
