Review: Amigo the Devil Finds Humor in Darkness on 'Born Against'
We've all got that one friend. He (or she, as it were) is funny as hell, but in a nihilistic way that is also a little disturbing. He's the guy who makes you laugh while the pit in your stomach grows because his worldview is a little too on the nose for comfort. Danny Kiranos, who goes by the moniker Amigo the Devil, is that friend and his new album Born Against delivers 10 tracks of cinematic darkness with a steady supply of clever turns of phrase and absurdist situations that keeps you smiling throughout.
Kiranos' influences are as obvious as they are diverse. Tom Waits, the king of musical nihilism, is there, as is the clever wordplay of Leonard Cohen. The playfulness (and, on some tracks, vocal delivery) of They Might Be Giants and the dark corner explorations of doom metal. Taken together, they're as odd as Kiranos himself, but they're also compelling in their own “what in the world is going on?” kind of way.
The album has a number of highlights but, for sense of humor, it's hard to beat “Murder at the Bingo Hall.” If you ever wondered if the world of cutthroat bingo gaming could be compared to mass killing (and if you have, you're certainly the kind of weirdo that Kiranos caters to), the answer is an inexplicable yes. With lines like “this dabber is a weapon, sending everyone to bingo heaven, held back by the numbers I don't have” and the truly delightful “everyone was sitting around like a people garden,” it's a song that is too silly to work, but does purely on the strength of Kiranos' total embrace of the oddity of the entire thing.
His obvious homage to Tom Waits (another purveyor of weirdo fatalism) is “Quiet as a Rat.” With its brass-driven cabaret feel, it's a much less funny song, though lines like “everyone treats commandments like more of a bucket list” or “if man was made in his image, he could never perfect it, so what makes us think we can?” bring a bit of a smile. But mostly, it's profile of the lost; a kid bullied and beaten at school. A man committing suicide with a hospital bill his only, but effective, note. A girl dying of an overdosed and not discovered for weeks, at which time everyone commented “what a good friend she was.”
The album's one deviation from any humor is a knife-wound to the heart. “Letter from Death Row” finds a man in his last day before an execution writing his lover. In the letter, he moves from love (we were drunk and yelled 'if we die... whatever) to a plea to move on (now the only dream I have is watching you grow old forever) to a gut punch of a look into the void of his impending death (there won't be any angels singing me to sleep. You're the closest thing to Heaven I'll ever see.)
Born Against is far from an album that's going to fit everyone's needs. It's weird. It can't find a genre to stick with. If you're looking for fun sounds of Summer, this ain't it. Even if you're a fan of roots music, with its wealth of depression, alcoholism, and troubling murder ballads, the pure darkness of this album may be too much. But for those who, like me, walk in that darkness often, Amigo the Devil is a kindred spirit, and Born Against is like coming home.