Mary Gauthier
Filth & Fire

Munich Records MRCD 226

by Marianne Ebertowski

If ever an album scared the living daylights out of me, it's Mary Gauthier's newest release Filth and Fire. It is scary because it takes you to places you would rather not know about and - should you ever have been to some of them - would rather forget. It is scary because Gauthier has the guts to sing about personal experiences with an honesty and intensity that is sometimes hard to bear, which somehow knocks the ground out from under your feet. But most of all, Filth and Fire scares me because it sounds so much like a one-way ticket back into a private, inescapable hell.

Filth & Fire is the account of a lifelong attempt to keep standing and to get up after every knock-down. Where Gauthier's "official debut" Dragqueens in Limousines revealed only a tip of the iceberg, Filth & Fire shoves the whole ugly, cold thing straight into your face: it is the iceberg, or at least a big chunk of it with, as I fear, a lot worse still hidden.

The album starts with the threatening sound of a Hammond B-3 organ. Then Gauthier's voice comes in with the words:

In the darkness it finds me
the terrible fire
it don't matter how much I pray
The flames leap and burn me
There's nothing I can do
To make the fear go away
I try to keep moving
Try not to look back
Push really hard on the stone
But I walk through the fire alone

It's a voice that gets to you immediately, not because of its beauty but because it expresses intense pain, frustration, loneliness and anger, emotions which seem to come from deep inside the singer's bones. "Walk Through The Fire" is the first station of a nightmarish trip through a desolate landscape of fear, cruelty and desertion, every song adding a piece to a puzzle which is solved halfway through the album. A hint is given early on:

If there's something missing
Or if you're hiding from
Someone you long to have known
Then you'll walk through the fire..
alone

In "A Long Way To Fall," Gauthier continues her lonely walk through the fire as she exposes an inability to hold on to someone, destroying something good and feeling utterly helpless about it.

I don't know what comes over me
Looks like I'll always be
the troubled kid that runs away from home
I reached for you the other night
you rolled away and moved against the wall
I fell into the space between us
that's a long way to fall

"Sugar Cane", co-written with Caty Curtis (who also recorded it on her last album), takes the listener to Mary Gauthier's Louisiana homeland and paints a grim picture of living conditions. The burning sugar cane fields become a symbol for the greediness of an industry that doesn't care about people's welfare. The fields also become the material, palpable side of the filth and fire addressed on this album.

The soot and ash are falling like a dark and deadly snow
The air is full of poison to the Golf of Mexico
Dirty air, dirty laundry, dirty money, dirty rain
A dirty deal with the devil, burning the sugar cane

Against this grim background, Gauthier tells a personal history of addiction running in a family from an alcoholic father to a heroin-addicted daughter.

From the bitter tears of helplesness
Falling from your grandma's face
As they strap you to the stretcher
While she quickly packs your suitcase
From the money that you stole from her
on the day she died
To the long lines at the clinic
Waiting for a day's supply, a day's supply

"Merry Go Round" seems like a hard song to follow, but "Good-Bye" might just be the most terrifying song ever written. It provides the missing piece of the puzzle of a life story which would be difficult to understand from the outside without these introductory lines.

Born a bastard child in New Orleans
to a woman I've never seen
I don't know if she ever held me
All I know is she let go of me. ...
Good-bye could have been my family name

All the explanation one needs for a life full of drifting, restlessness, and pain seems to be locked up in those five lines, but the final lines are just as shockingly matter-of-fact as the first.

When it's time to leave forever
I pray the Lord don't take me slow.
I don't know where I'm going
I just wanna say good-bye and go.

It's a song that indeed "passes through like thunder" and leaves the listener in a state of bewilderment, the sort of song you hope you'll never have to listen to. Most of all, it's the sort of song you hope nobody will ever have to write. That Mary Gauthier has the courage to write this song and perform it every night says more about her than any reviewer can. It sounds like the hardest thing she has ever done as a singer-songwriter. This would be a good moment for the album to end because everything seems to come to a halt, at least for a while. But then again, maybe it's a good thing that this outcry is hidden in the middle of the album.

"Camelot Hotel", which just like "Christmas In Paradise" has been a part of her live repertoire a long time, shows Gauthier's talent as a storyteller with an observant eye for other people's misery. With its infamous "cigarette/kitchenette" rhyme, "Camelot Hotel" comes close to Leonard Cohen's atmospheric style of writing and it is somewhat ironic that Cohen has "stolen" Mary's rhyme on his latest album. The story of a desperate couple in a rundown motel room trying to make it through the night, it strikes the same emotional chord as "Christmas in Paradise," a song about homeless people surviving under a bridge in Key West, Florida. Between "Camelot Hotel" and "Christmas In Paradise," Gauthier continues her personal life story. "After You're Gone" is a touching, desolate description of the apparent asymmetry of feelings in the ending of a relationship, an ending for which the singer takes the blame.

You're crying cause I'm not crying
You're crying while I sit here looking strong
You're sad 'cause I don't feel the pain you're feeling
But my turn's coming after you're gone
.
After you're gone I'll fall to pieces
After you're gone it's me I'll blame
I'll think of all kindness you've shown me
And I'll hate myself, 'cause I never change

With Gurf Morlix on harmony vocals and steel guitar, "After You're Gone" sounds like a classic country song but goes to emotional depths the average country song avoids. It is also Mary Gauthier's best singing performance so far. A similar subject is touched upon in "The Sun Faces The Color Of Everything" in which passion has faded in a relationship, but this time the lovers hold on to each other.

Me and you we wait it out, we wait it out
It might be 'round the bend
Every time we think it's gone
It comes back again.

If "Good-Bye" is the darkest song on the album, "The Ledge" comes pretty close. It is hard to summarize the condensed description of a lifetime of running away from cruelty and meanness, of getting caught up in it and trying to get out, damaged but wiser.

I held a grudge, I held a gun,
Held contempt for everyone
I couldn't cry, I couldn't learn

I lived alone. I lived in rage
I lived in darkness inside a cage
On the fringe, a refugee
I couldn't trace it back to me
I grew mean, I grew small
I grew tired of it all

Running scared, running down
Running low to the ground
The blows were hard, the blows were mean
The blows were low, the hits were clean
I was left black and blue
On the ledge, looking up at you.

So ends Gauthier's story of Filth & Fire. Not exactly a happy ending to a trip through hell which is far from over, but after this nightmarish personal journey her last lines almost sound like a sparkle of hope. Filth & Fire is a milestone in Mary Gauthier's career. From her reluctant step into the world of singer-songwriters documented on the self-released Dixie Kitchen and the stunning Dragqueens in Limousines, she has developed into an artist who is knocking very hard on the door of the league of the very best. She has become clearer, simpler, and harder in her language. She has also become a better singer. Needless to say Gurf Morlix did his usual excellent job as producer, harmony singer, and multi-instrumentalist. The small crew of musicians, which includes Slaid Cleaves, Peter Rowan, and ex-Small Faces Ian Maclagan on Hammond B-3, has provided just the right background for an album which, if there were any fairness on this world, would write history. Filth & Fire is a masterpiece. It is also an album you won't be able to listen to very often. The stuff Mary Gauthier's songs are made of is the sort of stuff you want to escape from, like you want to walk away from death, disease, old age, or a bum in the streets. Only you know you can't; it is gonna get you in the end. So does Filth and Fire.

I do not expect Mary Gauthier to write cheerful and happy songs in the future, but I do hope that for her next album she will not have to revisit the place this one comes from. Somehow there must be a soft spot to fall even for a bastard child from New Orleans.

*Information on Mary Gauthier's music can be found on the artist's website: www.marygauthier.com Filth & Fire has not yet been released in the United States but can be ordered from www.munichrecords.com

Contact Marianne Ebertowski at: ebertowski-at-rockzilla.net

 
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