Iris Marlowe - Dead by Dawn
It's a match made in heaven: horror writer Bee Delores reviewing Iris Marlowe's Dead By Dawn -- an album that "will make any horror-loving heart grow three times in size."
One of the most influential horror films of all time, Sam Raimi's Evil Dead 2 worms into the darkest, bloodiest depths of human consciousness. It's a cacophony of the macabre and deranged, as dead walkers (called deadites) crawl decaying out of the ground. Iris Marlowe centers her latest album, Dead by Dawn, around the gnarled tentacles of the iconic film with country & western dressing. "I wanted my album to feel like a horror cult classic through a western lens," she told us earlier this month, also noting that the album moniker comes from the deadites' chilling refrain: "Dead by dawn!"
Across the rotted wasteland, Marlowe collects clamoring moans and sighs to feed her insatiable musical appetite. "Give me your soul, sweet infatuation / Famine to feast, eternal damnation," she licks her chops with the bone-rattling incantation, "Witch of the Blood Red Moon." Lyrics toil over sinister imagery that grabs you around the throat, as guitars bubble and overflow with acidic melodies. There's no stopping the beast from within; it claws and tears through the fabric of expectation. Marlowe composes some of her best work to date, demonstrated with songs such as "Death Valley Dust" and "Swallow Your Soul." You can argue Dead by Dawn is a concept album, in the vein of Bror Gunnar Jansson's They Found My Body in a Bag. It uses twistedly eerie styles to transmit horrifying stories that, perhaps, unwittingly speak to the human experience.
"You get what you pay for when you rob a man blind / My arms tied behind me, guess you say I'm in a bind / Dug my own grave with a rusted old spade," Marlowe sucks the air from the room. It's startling imagery drawn from a well of real terror. But it's rooted in truth. In the throes of what feels like ruin, we, as human beings, are victims of our own unraveling.
"Even though some of my songs branch into horror storylines, there’s still elements of queer identity in my songwriting," Marlowe also stressed in our interview. "Each album has an anthem I’ve written for the queer experience. I really want to make country music for folks that don’t relate to some of the subjects of modern-day country music."
"I'll give you a god complex, my touch of serpents," she hisses in "Pray to Me." "Lend me your mercy." A swampy, slithering sidewinder floats to the top of the album's murky surface. Iris Marlowe dips her hands into the water, delighting the audience with blistering string work and a suffocating sense of doom. Even with the toe-steppin' closer, "Two Step into Hell," there's darkness percolating in the croak of the guitar and Marlowe's siren-like vocals. "Got 666 tattooed on my heart," she confesses.
Iris Marlowe's Dead by Dawn will make any horror-loving heart grow three times in size. While coated in skin-blistering embers (think: Johnny Cash's "Delia's Gone"), it never misses a country beat that keeps it swirling in tradition. Country music has long been drenched in Southern Gothic musicality, as you'll also find with much of Bobbie Gentry's work, for example. It's just that contemporary country music side-steps that particular style. Thankfully, Marlowe is here to remind us all that country & western music has always been on the creepy side of life.
