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Blood Meridian’s Kick Up the Dust is like the perfect soundtrack to my favorite comic book series, Preacher. Both are about Americana, both deal with the big guy in the sky, both have a hankerin’ for drinking and partial insanity, and both take some trippy, dark turns in the face of their scarred humanity. Kick Up the Dust is a lyrically scathing piece of country-psych-folkblues by way of frontman Matthew Camirand (of Black Mountain) who learned guitar by listening to the Ramones. This record does not want to be your drinkin’ buddy — it gets under the skin with acoustic apostasy, and as the song styles change at a gripping pace, leaving the listener wallowing in the fact that, at the end of the day, we are all pretty much totally alone. Depressing? Sure! But the darkness is as easily imbibed as the whiskey it was fueled on, and Camirand’s refreshing take on bluesy Americana is born out of his own dusky delight.
