Worker Bee - Tangler

Not your amusement park's version of the old west, Worker Bee presents an unrefined diorama of a one-horse town through well-strung (and strummed) songs without sounding overly country or buying a banjo. Pieced together by tape and tune, Tangler has exposed corners of cardboard and frayed bits of construction paper visible, for a raw and ragged album that can get under your skin and into your bones if you let it. From my barstool, it looks something like this, with burned edges and scatted smoke stains.

Dusty melodies billow across the ground while wind whistles through cracks in the walls of an abandoned general store, clicks of drum sticks keep time as the town rots towards its demise. There's a tinge of pain in the pleading first words of "Come Back" over the state of a town left dirty and dollarless, and there's tension beneath the floorboards. Even the dirt's unsettled by the guitar-playing, gun-slinging owner of the town's one horse who rides in kicking up a trail of doom among "Nesting" plodding drums, hectic cymbals, and rapid rim shots, and faint bells dinging in the distance. Singing over slightly twanging strings with a pair of inherited smoker's lungs, the man sits at the bar filling the small, stank saloon with smells of whiskey, gun powder, and dried blood. He's the kind of man who'd take a lady for a walk and return alone. The kind of man who'd kick a dead horse to watch it bleed. Just one glance starts the bar fight between him, the "Cold Rats" and scoundrels, and someone's gotta die before it ends. Embodying the message of "Rough Magic", "a man's mind is always raining", the thick-skinned man stands over broken bottles donned in black coordinated with his core, as drums hit like buckets on a steel roof and tambourines than cling and clank like spurs. You can sit down in his bar, but you better leave your hand on your gun. This album has drums that can drive the devil out of town, and "All Roads" lead to the night, where the men get "burned by the moon" but never die. Tangler leaves you thinking, despite the flighty, feminine name, Worker Bee might not be a band to mess with.

At times resonating more of a 'new west' sound than old, Tangler is a bit rough around the edges, but nothing some smooth whiskey can't fix. So I'm gonna put my faded black boots on, kick a pony in the gut just to get blood on the tips, spur it in the neck to watch the red river wash away the boot prints, then get myself to a local watering hole.

Listen
Own
Last
Space
Site