Whilst The Twilight Saga has been busy emasculating vampires and doing for Dracula what Brokeback Mountain did for Clint Eastwood, the wonderfully unskippable opening sequence to HBO’s ‘True Blood’ series has at least ensured a degree of mythical menace remains, thanks to its gloriously threatening images of decomposing animals, run down ol’ liqour stores, and crazed gospel choirs.
And it’s down by those abandoned Cadillac-filled swamps that Timber Timbre’s third album- the appropriately named ‘Creep On Creepin’ On’- lurks. Conjuring a fiendish brew of moody, muddy blues, the band are somewhat impossibly Canadian: yet their music is hell bent (literally) on celebrating all that is American, dirty and gaudy. For those most part, it’s hard not to fall under their spell- first track ‘Bad Ritual’ (which shares more than a titular reference to True Blood’s theme tune ‘Bad Things’) is an accomplished opener, whilst the bluesy ‘Do I Have The Power’ and the brilliantly off-kilter saloon piano/ thunder clap drumming of ‘Too Old To Die Young’ is spooky, spooky, spooky. There’s a line on ‘Black Water’, too: ‘we reached the moons’ icy cauldron and found the spirit that I craved‘.
