Earlier this year, NYC’s The Mortal Prophets (led by John Beckmann) shared their highly anticipated debut EP, Stomp the Devil, produced by David Sisko and featuring collaborations with Gary Lucas (Captain Beefheart). Now, the band announces their forthcoming debut LP, Me and the Devil, out December 9. For their first full-length, Beckmann joined forces with Irish musician and producer William Declan Lucey (Rubyhorse, Leftbank), with whom he developed the record’s atmospheric, noisy sound. Glide is premiering the title track that howls with a Black Rebel Motorcycle Club meets Nick Cave distinguished dark palette that echoes of beat poets and hellraisers.
Said Beckmann of the ebb and flow between him and Lucey:
“I started this new album with William Declan Lucey while I was also literally in the middle of making ‘Stomp the Devil.’ I had gathered a great deal of material I became obsessed with, and it simply wasn’t possible to get it all done with one producer because of time constraints. Hence, I reached out to William, we started our musical escapade in early June 2021, and we finished the album towards the end of February 2022, and mastered it just before ‘Stomp’ was released in May of this year.
It’s purposefully a very live-sounding album, we recruited some very talented musicians that William has worked with before.
He and I have similar musical interests in early Delta blues, and we’re both fond of Brian Eno, Daniel Langois, and Tom Waits among others, so it was a very natural fit, we have a smooth working relationship, it’s very fluid, not heavy-handed. One prerequisite was that I wanted to incorporate as much of the music from my initial demos as possible because there was some nice atmospherics I wanted to keep. It varies from song to song, but we probably kept over 50% of the original music, bringing in Nate Barnes primarily for drums, Yuval Lion played some mean drums on a few tracks, and William strutted his stuff on a variety of instruments. He’s friends with Dana Colley from Morphine, who graced us on ‘Baby Please Don’t Go.’ Joe Philpott offered up some sexy pedal steel riffs, Joe Carey played some outlandish harmonica on ‘Pretty Girl in the Pines.’ Aoibheann Carey-Philpott unleashed soulful and poignant vocals on two tracks – ‘Soul of a Man,’ and ‘Lord, I’m the True Vine.’ A sensational yet relatively obscure song from 1930 by Eddie Head and Family.”
As described, the result of their collaboration, the bold, shape-shifting songbook of Me and the Devil, is a softer, more poetic record reflecting Beckmann’s love of everything from primitive blues to the raucous punk of Suicide to the ethereal ambient sequences of German electronica. To introduce the record’s eclectic and expansive sound, the band is sharing the record’s first single, the title track “Me and the Devil.”
As Beckmann described of the sonic inspirations behind the LP and its title track:
“‘Me and the Devil’ sets the stage for the music that follows on the album. I’m a huge fan of early Delta blues, and certainly Robert Johnson, so the first two songs on the album are a tribute to him, other songs are by Big Joe Williams, Blind Willie Johnson, Charley Patton, Lead Belly, Son House, and Blind Willie Johnson, all equally influential for me. ‘Jesus is Coming’ is especially prescient, as it’s a song about the Spanish flu, and predates Covid by 100 years.
These songs are the essence of America’s primal scream, they are chilling, and profound in their austere beauty and directness, they are so full of tragedy and hope, lost loves, and personal and societal struggles, not much has changed in a hundred years. They are all songs that I find deeply moving and poignant. My versions are not covers, in the true sense; they are contemporary reinterpretations, it’s a poetic attempt that hopefully, people will appreciate, and I’m very proud of it.”
The Mortal Prophets’ Me and the Devil is out this December via all DSPs.
