Antic Clay - Hilarious Death Blues '2007

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ANTIC CLAY: Hilarious Death Blues (2007)
Hilarious Death Blues is a dark, smoldering journey into isolated Americana. Its
country music thats silently aware of the impending apocalypse, and doesnt pine
over lost love and and the daily grind of an oppressive job. Its a low and
lonesome sound that holds a mirror to existential angst and rages against
entropy, ennui, murk and miasma with flourishing, poetic beauty.
--Chad Radford

Former MYSSOURI frontman Michael Bradley has regained his sight and is now going
under the name Antic Clay. Debuting with a double-disc dose of lonesome desert
laments cheerily titled HILARIOUS DEATH BLUES, Bradley/Clay wanders a similar
forlorn and spooked landscape as Jeffrey Lee Pierce, Nick Cave, Mark Lanegan,
Simon Bonney and other blues-obsessed artsy white guys. Dark, minimal and
restrained, two full discs of this approach proves to be a chore at one sitting,
but overall this is chillingly haunting stuff, and a welcome direction for
Bradley.
--Jeff Clark, STOMP AND STAMMER

ANTIC CLAY AND HIS BRUISED DUSTY by BlackBird Merle Leonce Bone

Let yourself get taken in by the dark times emerging from this virile and exiled
dumper, vessel of all the ancient echoes. The funerary heart for decadent
Mormon. Antic Clay is not only about a more electrification prone to tension
even if the man does cast his painful strength and his discreet vision and his
wild poet constitution in the events. With Antic Clay, it is not only about
rooting oneself in a rotten compost, reluctant to sustain a tree with hardly any
ancestry. 
No, as a matter of fact, beauty drags itself, as it happens, from something more
foreign to traditions, infinitely more hidden. 
From Antic’s voice, this splendid and rough thing, this ambivalence of
cold and hot timbre you would say, and you wouldn’t be wrong. 
From the brave and brotherly clap hands’ running, and to this can be
added the tangle of a harmonica, which blades have been replaced by scraps of
biting winds, combined with guitar-textures, knocking, eager for glissando dirt,
so far and so close, breath of whiskey in the inside. The whitened bones of the
horse’s carcass as primal harp, under the best of circumstances
accompanying the bruised dusty yet glamorous murmurs of the death-a-billy cantor
from an old incandescent Myssouri. Reverend Antic Clay is this curse of
rebellious god, resisting song-writing, constantly swaying between hope and
destruction, between, tabula rasa, erasing it all and the stoic and profound
renunciation. 

Don’t resist, get yourself emotionally assaulted by his outburst of urban
funeral orations and rural incantations, by this viscous and irrevocable dirge
when it recalls, in that furious and stately way, the sudden deaths with the
broken hearts unable to be soothed, the ancestral and deep fears, the tears when
it’s time for smoke in campfires. 

--Manuel Aubert a.k.a. BlackBird Merle Leonce Bone, Tours, France, Friday, June
8th. 2007.
(Translation: Paula Antunes)

Biography:
Michael Bradley (aka Antic Clay) started the southern-gothic band MYSSOURI in
Atlanta, Georgia in 1996. Drawing influences from Nick Cave, Johnny Cash, The
Doors, 16 Horsepower and Joy Division, the band burned a dark and bright scar on
the Georgia scene, playing myriad shows, festivals and conferences, including
CMJ twice, and opening for well-known acts such as The Damned, Black Rebel
Motorcycle Club, Concrete Blonde, Reverend Horton Heat, Detroit Cobras, The
Angels Of Light, The Gunga Din, Waco Brothers and more. But they never were able
to tour, and perhaps because of that the fire burned out after 7 years and 3
records. Myssouri disbanded in 2003. Bradley has continued on, playing
stripped-down shows with his acoustic guitar and harmonica, and the artistic
direction hinted at when he had Myssouri covering songs by the likes of Townes
Van Zandt and Lee Hazlewood (and of course Johnny Cash) has become his clear and
chosen path.

He adopted the name Antic Clay and traveled to a friends studio in the mountains
of Asheville, North Carolina. From these sessions comes the audacious double-cd
debut Hilarious Death Blues, a title inspired, like the pseudonym Antic Clay, by
the dark westerns of reknowned American novelist Cormac McCarthy. Bradley/Clay
sang, wrote and played most everything on the album, which has a feeling about
it both archaic and modern, heavy on the reverb and sparse on the
instrumentation like old Sun Studios recordings, very much inspired by late
night lost highway AM radio, vintage country songs and the mythology of the Old
West, although the lyrical content is far too dark and cynical to make it on the
Grand Ole Opry. HDB puts you in an old dark wooden room with only a burlap
curtain against the night wind, and a guttering tallow candles incandescent
dance across your old bottle of bourbon. It is best listened to loud. And alone.
There are bluesy dirges, somber western ballads, dissonant foot-stompers, tavern
songs and even an unlikely sea shanty. The lone cover, Decades by Joy Division,
is barely recognizable as the post-punk classic. It is stripped to the root with
guitar, harmonica, voice and violin, and made all the more powerful for it.

HILARIOUS DEATH BLUES is 3+ years in the making, and is more of a document of a
period of time in a writers life than a statement of intent. Indeed, Bradleys
new side-project of vintage country covers SINNERS AND SONGRIDERS may reveal
much about the future path for Antic Clay, strongly hinted at in the lonesome
country swagger of the song Non-Prophet Blues (from album B, The Horseless
Rider). 
Dark night in Nashville, here we come.

Tracklist: 

CD1:

01. Clean Blues (4:07)
02. Broken Throat Blues (5:24)
03. The Table of Souls (9:32)
04. Look Down the Dark Barrel (5:06)
05. Wainwright (4:53)
06. Violence Is Yours (4:05)
07. Islay and Ale (2:31)
08. On Holy Mountain (3:31)
09. Decades (5:34)
10. Thousand Star Hotel (4:25)

CD2:

01. Filthy Lucre King (3:38)
02. Red Grass, Black Pasture (5:43)
03. Sago Mine (4:05)
04. Tithing Blues (3:08)
05. Non-Prophet Blues (4:11)
06. Furnace Song (4:50)
07. Hey John (3:09)
08. Wife and Widow (3:26)
09. Roll! Black Ocean! (4:33)
10. Estela (6:30)
11. Undrown Yourself (4:15)

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