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Howlin Rain: The Long Follow

As the process of writing and arranging, and then recording the album stretched from year to year, Miller looked wilder and skinnier. His hair grew long, his beard became bushy and thick. He looked drained or enthused, alternating between excited or like he was being run through the ringer—or both. This record was a serious ordeal.

The literate Miller read Moby Dick, Melville’s brilliant and disastrous epic about a sea captain chasing the white whale.

VIII. The Long Follow, Part II: Across The Russian Wilds

When Miller told me that he and Katznelson had begun reading Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace together, I joined the party. We compared notes about how hard it was to get through the first 50 pages meeting character after character, each referred to by at least three different Russian names. And then, after the initial disorientation, Tolstoy’s mastery of the complexities of history; the razorine eye with which he describes complicated human emotion. After about four months, Miller and I met at a cafe and discussed the novel in full. And he gave me a burned CD—the new album: The Russian Wilds.

At first listen, the album was perplexing. It was challenging and difficult to follow. Whenever the band hit an intriguing groove, they hit it for maybe four measures, maybe two—then completely shifted gears. And the sounds were all over the place: an echoing blues riff that could have come from the ‘80s, a chorus with a three-part male harmony that sounded like Journey with Lynyrd Skynyrd’s female backup singers behind that. Vocals that sometimes broke with a tight, Steely Dan reverb and falsetto voices wavering above that on the chorus.

The record seemed to be stitched together from pieces of rock history. Another song sounded a bit like Freddie Mercury, Miller singing in falsetto about a shotgun in his hand, and then alarm bells that were reminiscent of the bass line to “Flash Gordon.” In the middle of the record was a cover of a James Gang tune. They’d filled it out with lush harmonies and made it sound like church. It took a little while to remember the name: “Collage.” That seemed to be what they were doing, like Rubin had taken that suggestive rock tone quiltery that appeared on Magnificent Fiend and amped it up.

I listened over and over with headphones until I could make out lyrics. The song with those Queen allusions was called “Strange Thunder.”

Now I’m gone…
I left you a Rorschach on the wall
And a song…
In the blood and bone and strange thunder rolling down the hall

Then, the bass pulses in like an air raid. The drums trip in and turn time inside-out. The song becomes an enormous, all-guns-blazing rock assault that sticks in your mind for days at a time.

It’s a strange thunder
Rolling through my head

Oh. It was a man who had already done the deed, singing as the frag still rumbled across his brain. This album was darker and more hauntingly fucked up than I had realized. “Cherokee Werewolf” is told from the creepy perspective of a murderer hunting down his love and singing to her as he kills her and buries her. The triumph he hears in his head is a full-blown Journey harmony with the girls from Skynyrd rejoicing behind him—like it’s 1983 and you can see his mullet, and his Camaro, and his beard, and Mitchell is pulling these fat riffs in call-and-response:

Laura, my love, I found you
Laura, my love, not a sound from you
The maggots and worms are crawling you
From under the ground around you

It is twisted. The whole record is dark and grim-faced, but with a dry sense of humor that uses allusion; a fusion of different rock styles and forms; and an epic, novelistic approach to song structure, to tell what seems to be a loose cycle of stories about hard, dark men and the women who are the objects—and sometimes the targets—of their passion.

The Russian Wilds is a big, complex rock record—it may be the first true classic rock album of the twenty-first century. Such densely-layered production hasn’t come back in rock since punk ran it through with the switch-blade. Now it’s being repurposed by a reconstructed punk rocker. It’s disorienting. It doesn’t sound like anything you’ve heard before. Which is why your ear reaches for anything that does.

“The first thing you get is this bombast,” says Katznelson. “It straps you in. It’s like, ‘Come on! We’re going for a ride.’ And then, as you get used to it and know it more, the complexity and the brilliance comes out, and all the melodies really come out.”

Katznelson talks about playing the record for friends of his in England. “What they all come back to saying is, ‘We have not heard a big rock record like this in a long, long time. We didn’t even know that it could exist anymore.”

Epilogue: The Darkness

“There is a larger subject matter,” Miller says, back at his dining table in a room lined with record stacks and artwork and books. “The Howlin Rain songs—the lyrics—have always come from a personal place, but a lot of times, they’re written about more fantastical stories and subject matter. A lot of the songs on this are more personal, less fantastical. I tried—with the issue of love and loss, loss of faith and going to what’s beneath human loss—to delve back to something as a source that wasn’t just simple love or betrayal, but maybe memories that were uncomfortable or humiliating, or, as you get older, possibly even shameful. Seeing that sometimes destructive elements from things that seem glorious in youth, as it all unplays, become simply destructive and decaying over time. And even if not literally, then sometimes just the memory becomes a destructive resonance as it lingers in your heart. It can become regret.”

On “Can’t Satify Me Now,” the narrator sings a deep, gospel apology for once having reveled in a lover’s pain and anguish.

What Miller seems to be saying is that the beast is not all that far beneath the surface. That, in any of us, whether it’s cruelty or the ambition of the self made man, clawing and scratching with his two bloody hands, or some other dark thing, the beast is just not as far beneath the surface as any of us might like it to be. And, like Cash sang, it’s caged by frail and fragile bars.

And then there’s that wild man on the video screen, writhing and howling and laying it down on the guitar. The guy that Ethan Miller has sounded like all along.