Begushkin - Nightly Things (2007)

Nightly Things sounds like a lot of things - a backwoods black mass, a confusing joke, a Carpathian fever dream - but never actually settles into becoming any of them. It's too anxious, or too focused on staying unfocused, to be anything definable. This kind of furtive indifference, where influences and genre reference points are sampled and tossed aside just as quickly, has the potential for creating a disaster, but here it congeals nicely. This is an album that makes no sense and is all the better for it.

When I say "makes no sense," I really mean "doesn't conform to any kind of recognizable pattern." This results in something like the title track, which matches ghostly ambiance and eerily quavering guitar with lyrics that resemble a filthy slow-jam written by Rimbaud.

I could try to peg this as an I See A Darkness with strange gypsy-folk tendencies, but even with that unwieldy description I'd be ignoring the mock-poetic vocal style, the fascinating pairing of haunting and absurd, the way it tricks you into taking it seriously and then pokes you in the eye. The title track exemplifies the entire mood of the album. It sounds grave and spooky, an atmosphere that pulls you in until you realize you're listening to fancifully veiled descriptions of the devil's penis and increasingly painful sea-shanty metaphors for doin' it (the winner: "in your booty, I’ll be looting.")

Other songs are slightly more predictable. "At Night with Me" employs some of the most ridiculous lyrics but uses them seriously. Accordingly, the music is hushed and reverent, gushing strings and chilly mandolin. With this pairing an opposite mood to the title track occurs, and lines like "You can be my monkey girl / I will be the dude" are actually invested with some real feeling. "In the Yard" aims for increasingly preposterous apocalyptic imagery, but this build is matched with gypsy violin and theremin. An off-kilter tension remains in these songs' refusal to conform to expectation.

This is night music. It's an exploration of a landscape that seems like it could exist but becomes increasingly impossible to believe in. At times it's like Kentucky standing in for Romania, or vice-versa, with gypsy strings and picked guitars converging at some common and indistinguishable point. It embraces genre like a kid at a petting zoo - the needly stomp of the Black Heart Procession here, the wistful elegance of Django Reinhardt there, but inevitably rejects both place and influence. Stylistically, it refuses to behave. And that, as unsettling as it may be, is a good thing.