April 10, 2018

April Featured Review

Sarah Shook & the Disarmers: Years

by Jason D. 'Diesel' Hamad

With a twangy rock sound and punk attitude, Sarah Shook & the Disarmers step up to the bar and raise it, too, in new album Years

If the essence of punk is purity of spirit, then Sarah Shook is perhaps the greatest punk of our age. She bucks conventions she doesn’t even know are a thing. Her music is apolitical but personally rebellious, unflinchingly examining the dark corners of her psyche, awash in heartache, despair, and gallons upon gallons of alcohol. She digs deeper than most artists could bear and presents to her listeners a long look into her personal abyss, daring them to match her gaze.

“I'm in my element plumbing the depths of grief and rage because I've lived it, I'm still living it, and it's real as anything,” she says. “I think everyone needs to be more cool with feeling things, even ‘negative’ emotions like sadness or loneliness or flat out pain. We spend so much time and money on things to numb and suppress our feelings and we need to take a moment and ask ourselves what the hell is so bad about feelin' totally down sometimes. I've been taking a break from drinking for this very reason and it's a whole new world. Been spending a lot of time with myself and crying a shit ton. And it's fucking awesome. Let that shit out and then go be free.”

Asked about her influences, she scoffs. “I've gone through very real and extremely terrible shit and I have suffered traumatizing abuse for years and I've picked myself up and wiped the goddamn blood off my face and kept goin', and that's the only goddamn influence I got.”

Yet her musical influences are obvious as her angsty lyrics are set into a classic country rubric complete with pedal steel and a touch of alt country via the electric guitar. The songs are short and punchy, three to four-minute pieces that would fit into the Opry without question, though painted in darker shades than even Hank managed to pull from his palate before he got his ass fired. It’s like Lucinda Williams backed up Waymore’s Outlaws, with Lu still looking under rocks for her joy. And it’s this combination of bounding, high-spirited music with Shook’s bleak outlook and often flat-voiced delivery that makes these songs so compelling.

Shook herself is an antiestablishment figure, like Johnny Cash giving a middle finger to the world. But far more than Cash, it seems to be an inherent trait in Sarah, as if her very existence is a challenge to society’s perceptions. For the music industry, the patriarchy, or just about anybody who might have an idea about how she should do her thing, she gives zero fucks. She puts herself out there and challenges those who are afraid to tear her to pieces, knowing full well that they will fail. As she’s expressed in song, she’s a fuck up and she knows it, but who the hell are you to judge?

“Am I anti-establishment?” she asks rhetorically. “To my very core, my friend. Authority is a bullshit concept and breeds corruption and I will not abide any idiot trying to brandish it. Although I don't feel like I gotta yell really. There's a time and a place for yelling and it's infrequent and somewhere else usually.”

After laboring in relative obscurity, Shook & the Disarmers began gathering heaps of well-deserved acclaim after the reissue of their album Sidelong on Chicago-based boutique label Bloodshot Records in the spring of 2017. In the year since, the consistent buzz has led to a far wider audience and a travel schedule that would kill lessor road warriors.

“We've been touring pretty hardcore and it's about to get even crazier,” Shook says. “We got back to back Northeast/Midwest USA and Scandinavia tours comin' up and we'll be gone for 50 days. It's kinda surreal.

“We do great everywhere we go at this point, super audiences of diverse and good hearted people, lots of folks singin' along with the songs, which always warms my heart. I know some artists really hate that but the entire point of making music, to me, is to share it with the people who get it and love it, too. Sing on, kids!”

Following on the success of Sidelong is the band’s new album Years. Although it contains less of the eccentric Silversteinesque black humor displayed in such Sidelong staples as “The Nail” and “Fuck Up,” the new release follows the same basic pattern as its predecessor, with gloomy lyrics set on a twangy backdrop. This time, many of the stories center on one particularly entangling relationship. The first two singles—which happen to be the first two songs on the album—are exemplary of this.

Think of the album’s leadoff track, “Good as Gold,” as “The Captain” by Kasey Chambers if Chambers wore raggedy t-shirts, carried a knife clipped to her belt, and swore like a sailor on shore leave in Brisbane at the height of magpie swooping season. It’s a tale of dependence and regret verging on self-immolation. Although the song starts off cheerily enough with some naked acoustic strumming, it lasts only a moment before the veil of drunken despair is dropped:

“’Good as Gold’ is written from an ex's point of view,” Shook explains. “It's about a jealous, abusive person who realizes the person he is in a relationship [with] is a good and kind human being who will be absolutely fine when the relationship dissolves. And he will still be a miserable, insecure, self-pitying sack of shit. It's based on hours of actual arguments with said ex who once literally screamed at me, ‘You'll be good as gold!’ And I was like oh. Oh yeeeah... I actually will.”

“’New Ways to Fail’ is a great follow up to that story,” she continues, “written from my point of view when I've just about had all I can take. ‘I'm too damn tired to feed the dog or get out of bed,’ was a real thing. I was totally trapped in an abusive relationship, I was in a very deep, very dark depression, and there were many, many days when I simply did not have the willpower nor the strength to drag my ass out of bed and face the day. Being on the other side of that is... unquantifiable. Unquantifiable goodness and peace. And I want that freedom for everyone who is suffering in an abusive relationship.”

Delivered in Shook’s characteristic unemotive, almost dissociative tone, and laid out with bare-fact frankness, the song paints an emotionally crippled portrait of the artist, but demonstrates that even at her nethermost, her nonconformist fire-eating disposition dies hard:

On the other extreme of the bookends, the title and final track, “Years,” represents the light at the end of the tunnel of this torturous relationship.

“I wrote ‘Years’ two weeks before we went into the studio to record, which is insane,” says Shook. “We track everything live so every other song on the album we had rehearsed the fuck out of for months. But I hit up the boys and said, ‘Hey, I just wrote the title track and the last song on the album. We got two weeks to learn it.’ And everybody was on board because my bandmates believe in me as much as I believe in them and it was awesome.”

Aside from providing culmination for the album, the song also served as a personal catharsis for Sarah.

"’Years’ was a huge personal victory for me at the time I wrote it,” she explains. “It was, at long last, an acknowledgment that the relationship I was in was killing me and had been killing me for a long ass time. And it was time to get the hell outta Dodge. So you have an album totally packed with sorrow and suffering mostly centering around this abusive relationship—with some wry humor to get you through, of course—that ends on the ‘I've had enough, I've taken all I can stand, and I'm leaving your ass,’ note. It's the perfect outro.”

The lyrics have the feel of a resolution, of a course set after long contemplation, of stepping out from the shadows and into the light:

The song itself is even structured to highlight this transformation. It has a brighter sound than much of the rest of the album with a bounce to its step and Shook’s “do do do”-ing drawl-inflected scat verse displaying a kind of carefree vigor much opposed to the bottom-of-the-bottle loneliness emblematic of its predecessors. The piece even goes through a transition itself, as a false ending splits it between a countrified main body and a more rock-centric, kicked-up final movement ending with a wistful near-howl on Shook’s part, seeming to highlight that in some very real way, things are different for her than they had been before and that, although the pain still lingers, she’s finally able to move on.

The one track that seems an outlier to the album’s fucked up relationship theme is “What It Takes,” a high-octane call to action toward creating a more inclusive world that nevertheless highlights the personal cost of sticking one’s neck out for others:

I asked Shook what she’d discovered about society that surprised her or that she wished her mama had told her.

“I was extremely sheltered,” she explained, “albeit with the best of intentions. My parents did absolutely nothing to prepare me for the real world. And I don't blame them or have any ill will towards them; they were doing what they thought, at the time, was right. But yeah, when I hit the real world shit was on from the word go and I been playin' catch up ever since.”

I also asked what costs she felt she’s borne to create a better world, and her reply was characteristically blunt.

“There's no point in talking about any price I've paid for trying to create a more inclusive scene,” she said. “There are so many people who are truly suffering for the work they do and my losses are totally inconsequential in comparison. I'm starting to believe that the nature of love is sacrifice. Which totally blows. But it is what it is.”

And that’s about as fucking cheery as it gets, folks.

Other highlights include the foreboding, minor key affair “The Bottle Never Lets Me Down,” which Shook describes as “a song about being a no good, dirty drunk.” Punctuated by eerie pedal steel, it’s a slow-burning cautionary tale of blame shifting and the questionable efficacy of spirit-based self-medication:

“Lesson” highlights the benefits of Shook’s process of metamorphosis by emotional turmoil, demonstrating a post-pupal maturity gained through a painful chrysalis:

The acridity of those final lines directly addressing her heretofore tormentor prove, if any further evidence were needed, that while she feels she has bettered herself though her trials by fire, she is nevertheless not without bitterness.

Although chock full of fiery guitar throughout, the climax of the piece is definitely the bass-heavy finale where Shook gets as emotionally charged as she can without actually raising her voice, repeating the refrain before spitting that final rhetorical question several times, twisting it even more into a caustic epithet.

The one instance that seems to match the comedic stylings emblematic of Sidelong is “Damned if I Do, Damned if I Don’t.” With lighthearted, buoyant music, it tells a jocular hard-luck drunk’s tale of unsheltered misery:

Shook’s warbling delivery in the morose “Heartache in Hell” is the album’s most affective vocal performance, highlighted exceptionally well by end cap steel flourishes.

While it lacks some of the wit and breadth of Sidelong, perhaps focusing too incessantly on one particularly personal topic, Years is for the most part well-written and expertly delivered. Shook’s unique vocals, irascible attitude, and melancholic but ultimately redemptive tone draw comparisons to Lucinda Williams, and those comparisons are favorable given the early stage of her career. What remains to be seen is if Shook, who similarly draws on the pain of her own experiences, can maintain the clarity and power of her work if she has, indeed, turned a corner in her life. Years proves that Sarah Shook is a force on today’s country scene. And maybe it’s just because I root for the underdog, but I’m betting this is one fuck up who’s here to stay for years to come.

tldr: If punk country is your thing, Sarah Shook is one of the best. If it ain’t, get a new thing.

Buy Years on Amazon!

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