Music Arcades: Larkin Grimm: The Last Tree

Back in December 2006, just a couple of days after I'd completed my first full draft of The Book, I went to an "all day" festival (2pm to 11ish, though it started late because I was the only one there at 2.15pm and no one wanted to play just to me) at the Spitz, curated and promoted by the wonderful Howard Monk — who once upon a time was the drummer in The Clientele, I discovered recently, but that's not the only reason he's wonderful.

David Thomas Broughton stole the show that night/afternoon, but was far from the only highlight in a quite stunning line-up (that's the main reason Howard's wonderful). Somewhere in the late afternoon Larkin Grimm played for half an hour or so. What I wrote about her at the time now seems fairly tame:

I hadn't heard of Larkin Grimm before, but apparently she's a friend of Viking Moses, and her voice is the female counterpart to his. Imagine the pitch of Joni Mitchell with the power of Ian Gillan. She also has the most erotic mouth since Natalie Merchant. Her songs are folk from mixed race folks (she's from Georgia): Appalachian, Scottish, African Spiritual and elemental chants that could be Native American Indian.

Like I said, it was DTB that took my breath away, literally, that evening, so it was his CD that I rushed to get from the merchandise table on the way out. But something about Larkin Grimm kept nagging at my brain stem. I think it may have been her mouth. Not literally, you understand. I checked out the stuff on her MySpace. I searched for her on emusic, but none of her albums were available back then (they all are now).

So in the end, early last year, I gave in and bought this CD. Everything about it, and her, seems to point in the same direction. From the name, which starts playfully but ends with trouble, to the cover art that is part Eden and part H. R. Giger. It's not remotely a surprise when a dog starts barking two thirds of the way through the first song: there's almost an expectation that animals would be present at the recording (indeed my inner cynic did chip in with the possibility that the dog was overdubbed afterwards just to fulfil that expectation). Ditto when a seven-year-old girl duets with the Lady Grimm — whose own voice is sometimes girl, sometimes woman — on The Sun Comes Up.

For me, all this comes from the same place as Angela Carter's fiction or Marina Warner's essays about myth; that form of female sexuality that is both enticing to men and frightening because they know it speaks of an urge that they cannot satisfy (OK, I should speak for myself: it frightens me because I know I can't satisfy it). It's a very different place from the world of those more fey songstresses like Marissa Nadler — whom I also like, but have different feelings for.

The act on the bill that got me to that all-day festival was not Larkin Grimm and it wasn't David Thomas Broughton; it was Viking Moses. Viking Moses is a bit like the male version of Larkin, as in the bohemian-feral end of folk music, the sort that justifies the freak in freak folk (more than Devendra Banhart's exotic beard or Joanna Newsom's harp). But Viking didn't quite live up to my high expectations. It didn't help that Alan McGee rates him very highly, and you know what I think of Alan McGee's opinion. In the end, though, he doesn't have a mouth like Larkin Grimm, and no part of me is remotely bothered one way or the other whether I could satisfy Viking Moses sexually.

Here's the title track of The Last Tree.