`Another Nice Mess` is the latest full-length album by Neo-vaudeville folk outfit Curtis Ellers American Circus. The album features ten songs of loss and redemption and one about the joy of seeing a celebrity on the street.
We are led into this release via `True Love in the Exclusion Zone` a kind of twisted reflective love song which has an enticing almost dance like vibe with some delightful saxophone swathes splashed throughout. There`s further reflection on `Goddamn Loser` a slow burn tale of somebody whose seems permanently down on their luck.
`Conscientious Objector` is a meditative musing from the perspective of a dissenter shared over a kind of cha-cha-cha beat with some sweet flute tones sprinkled throughout. A stripped back song of intuition follows with the brief `We Know This by Heart`.
`Carry the Faces (for Martha Wills)` may well be a melancholic contemplation on the tragedy of war with what sounds like a singing saw giving the number a further sense of poignancy. It would appear that `Another Nice Mess (for Laurel & Hardy)` is a tender rumination on the passing of Oliver Hardy from the perspective of his friend and partner Oliver Hardy.
`Sonny Liston Told Us` which namechecks the undisputed boxing world heavyweight champion has an almost gospel or funereal like feel about it. There`s a captivating starkness about `An Only Child` which I have to say passed me by lyrically but may be about a fear of one’s mortality .
The strangely titled `Standard White Jesus` for me would have been a song that Tom Waits would have killed to have written and recorded. We have a kind of eulogy to a German-born acrobat and circus performer in `Time Moves Slow (for Lillian Leitzel)` with vocals shared across this sympathetic homage.
This long player closes out with `I Saw Fay Wray` about briefly sighting the actress made famous in the 1933 film King Kong in a New York suburb.
Curtis Ellers American Circus has Curtis Eller (banjo, lead vocals), Stacy Wolfson (harmony & lead vocals), Hugh Crumley (electric & fretless bass, background vocals), Andy Lyth (drums, percussion, timpani, background vocals) and Steve Cowles (saxophone, flute, singing saw) amongst its ranks. Additional musicians such as Joseph DeJarnette, Rima Fand, Saffy Lyth, and Chris Walldorf added their talents to bring this album to life.
`Another Nice Mess` is an oddly enchanting listen and after an initial sense of confusion, all becomes clear with this fairly quant and eccentric artist. This release is pretty unique but totally compelling.
Rating 8.5/10
