On the scene in the Southern USA since the mid-’90s, Tyler Keith specializes in what one might call roots punk. He’s played in numerous bands and even released a few records under his own name along the way. His latest, I Confess, is the byproduct of tough personal circumstances. Faced with a lack of ducats, no musical compadres, and rising rent, Keith made a series of wise decisions; he grabbed his instruments, set up his 4-track, and cut a truly solo record in his kitchen. Raw and bluesy, the 12-song set is out now on vinyl and digital through Black & Wyatt Records.
Way back in the boom years of the 1990s, Tyler Keith’s band The Neckbones earned the distinction of being the first, and for a long while, the only rock band on the Fat Possum label. Garage punk was the style, and after The Neckbones finally snapped, Keith fronted the Preachers’ Kids for a handful of albums, then moved on to Tyler Keith & the Apostles and Teardrop City.
Under his own name, with backup, he recorded The Last Drag in 2020 and Hell to Pay in 2023. Now here comes I Confess, which is Keith going it wholly alone with appropriately crude overdubs in the spirit of dangerous times. Opener “Out on a Limb” rips right into high gear, dishing a jagged blues-rock grind with a legit air of desperation about it.
“Lost in the Desert” is a downright doomy journey into echo overload with convulsions of harmonica. “Buckskin Girl” sounds like a Nuggets-styled act that took a wrong turn and ended up playing their one song at gunpoint on the outskirts of some demented backwoods carnival. And then “Black Cloud Blues” takes a further offramp into acidic paroxysmal pessimism; it’s a bit like a late-night dark arts communion of John Lee Hooker and Jeffrey Lee Pierce.
“High Plains Drifter” is a bluesy no-fi raunchabilly stomp done right, and “I Should’ve Known It Would End Like This” sounds like an Ork Records single recorded while the studio was enveloped in a mysterious haze. The title track is a ’60s-style stomp that resonates like it was cut in the back of a shack on the edge of the swamp in Tobe Hooper’s Eaten Alive. “Coming of Age” works up a grizzly R&R groove that would’ve made Lux Interior salivate like a rabid pack of Pavlovian pooches.
“Heart of Hearts” is a jangle pop single recorded in the back bedroom of the last trailer in the goddamn park. “Woke Up Dead” swings over into country territory, but with a strong current of the blues still palpable. “I Had to Let You Go” is a truly demented spastic racket, and closer “My Spirit Was Raised Inside” takes that raunchabilly scuzz and gives it a gospel tinge.
The only sad thing here is that Sam Phillips didn’t live to hear this album. To make it plain, too many roots-oriented artists playact at authenticity only to end up as either a puffed-up vessel of overwrought bellowing or a sterile white bread (crusts cut off) facsimile of their supposed inspirations.
But with I Confess, it’s clear as a crystal knick-knack on the dusty mantle in a dilapidated manor that Tyler Keith not only purged his anxieties but harnessed them into a beautifully bent trip down a lonely lane toward a cul-de-sac of inspired fuckedness. He deserves to have his rent paid for all eternity.
GRADED ON A CURVE:
A
