Reviewed by Scott Ray
In “Rosewater,” the first track on Justin Peter Kinkel-Schuster’s third solo album, No Tongue Can Tell, dreamy guitar lines, delicate piano, and impeccably harmonized vocals come together in the kind of waltz that owes as much to classic, pre-glitz country music as it does to the hymns of blood the record’s title subconsciously evokes. I say subconsciously because Kinkel-Schuster told me he wasn’t thinking of any bible verses when he named the record. I’m not sure if I can believe him.
The soothing tones of this first song are juxtaposed with violent, religious imagery—an excellent synopsis of the record and of Kinkel-Schuster’s work in general. Bloody hands, dark vestibules, dust hanging in the air, and ethereal sisters all haunt the tune before the speaker recognizes the world as another juxtaposition, a “rosewater bath full of horseshit.” After this realization, the singer is free to make his final confession: that he never believed in whatever higher power has been haunting him in the song. This duality of beauty and profound ugliness exists in all of Kinkel-Schuster’s work, as well as the struggle between the stories and traditions the characters in the songs have grown up with and the stories and traditions they feel compelled to reclaim and tell for themselves.
Ten years ago, when I first came across Kinkel-Schuster’s music, it was through the debut album Phantom Limb by his band Water Liars, a duo from Oxford, Mississippi who borrowed their name from a legendary Barry Hannah story. What struck me then was how deeply Southern the music sounded—this was difficult to describe to those who hadn’t heard the music yet. Because it was rock music, the connotations of Southern rock—bombastic, working-class regional pride—are what come to mind, but that genre is not at all what I meant. No, this was the music of not just family, but the weight of family. The music of not just the church, but about the lingering side effects that come from growing up hearing sermons of fire and brimstone. The music of not just the South, but of the land’s bloody, terrifying legacy. Also, though, it was the music of the South’s stunning resilience and beauty.
No Tongue Can Tell picks up on these themes, but over the course of the record seems to resolve the inherent contradictions in the subject matter more completely than Kinkel-Schuster has in the past. Despite the liberation of rejecting the heaviness of religion (or family, or the past) in the first tune, something never quite possible in his previous works, there are still songs here that feature the kind of nihilism or depictions of empty misdeeds found in some of his earlier songs. “Mama’s Cash (After Nico Walker),” an homage to the novelist whose semi-autobiographical novel recounts the experience of an opiate addicted bank robber, calls to mind songs like “Wyoming” and “Swannonoa,” Water Liars songs about doomed hardscrabble characters on hard times.
There remains a searching in these songs, but it isn’t as much concerned with the temporary pleasures afforded by drugs, sex, money, and restless rambling found in Kinkel-Schuster’s earlier work. In “Arizona,” perhaps the most moving moment on the record, the speaker recalls a dream in which he played piano with Arizona Dranes, a blind gospel artist mostly active in the 1920s. Under a swirling organ he confesses (much less confidently and defiantly than the speaker in Rosewater) he’s had doubts about faith, but the “keys of this piano/are the closest I have felt to Jesus’ face.” Despite this there’s a tension between this “godly vision” the speaker can find momentarily in music and the equally valid enlightenment found in “blessed…earthly sight.” This idea that comfort can be found in music pops up in later songs as well when speakers “put [their] faith in endless melody” or acknowledge that “there is a good bit to be said/for hanging in and singing/as loud as you can yell.” Perhaps Kinkel-Schuster doesn’t have an answer for why there must be so much darkness and searching, but he’s got some suggestions for how to get through these dark nights of the soul.
Overall, there is something settled about the songs on this record. Perhaps there are terrible things in the world, but it is possible to make a life in it. In the earnest “My Heart, My Home,” the singer expresses the simple pleasures of making dinner, of walking the dogs with a loved companion. In one of Kinkel-Schuster’s most well-known songs, the narrator confesses there’s “something wrong in me that makes me have to leave.” The contentment in “My Heart, My Home,” is miles away from earlier Kinkel-Schuster songs that romanticize self-inflicted isolation and rambling. Even in the more sardonic, “The Widow’s Gift,” where the gift is finding “there ain’t much worse than dying,” there is release in accepting that when the worst happens, there’s not much more that can be done to you. That this song is an earwig you’ll be humming later helps the bittersweet medicine go down.
Musically, Kinkel-Schuster is working with a more lush palette than previous efforts. Though he’s always played almost all of the instruments in his solo work (save for some guitar by GR Robinson, a longtime collaborator), this record employs more piano, more electric guitar, and more elaborate percussion. Perhaps the most noticeable instrumental addition is the ample use of organ, contributing to the record’s Southern Gothic hymnal atmosphere.
It should perhaps come as no surprise that an artist whose previous band was named after a famous southern short story frequently references literature in his songs. Beyond the Nico Walker homage, the title track includes the epigraph “After William Stafford,” the legendary American poet. Some of the lyrics of the song are borrowed from a poem of Stafford’s called “A Song in the Manner of Flannery O’Connor,” which places Kinkel-Schuster’s work in conversation with two titans of American and Southern mythmaking. Like William Stafford, much of Kinkel-Schuster’s work over the years could be thought of as the soundtrack of “traveling through the dark.” Perhaps though, as suggested by “Soft Spot,” the record’s final song, Kinkel-Schuster has finally found something soft amid the darkness.
Scott Ray is from Mississippi. He is the Flash Flood Editor for American Literary Review and a PhD candidate at the University of North Texas. His poems, stories, and scripts can be found at Hobart, Measure, and elsewhere.