americana / gothic / dark country

Silas J. Dirge is the onomatopoeic moniker of a Dutch singer/songwriter whose outlaw ballads really transport the feeling of a 20th duel scene on the streets of Laredo with hayballs flying across the path.

With the release of his second full-length called “The Poor Devil”, he shows why dark country and outlaw ballads will never die. He follows in the footsteps of artists like Townes van Zandt and Johnny Cash, but also more modern heroes like David Eugene Edwards or Conny Ochs. 
The interesting thing about the genre itself is the fact that musically there is hardly anything new under the sun and in a way the most important thing is the voice and the vocal delivery of the lyrics. The same can be said about “The Poor Devil” - apart from the final track “Dolly Shot” whose harmonium and electric guitar melodies are quite noisy and make for a very different musical landscape. It’s less 19th century wild west and more 22nd century futuristic city center where the enemies meet for their final shootout which is then dismissed as both see that they are nothing more than victims of a society which pushes them to the brink of insanity. And at that moment both find the way into the next cemeteries where they sit on one of the gravestones and look and moan the fellow enemies they had to bury. 

Silas’ voice is really something as it got this little rasp like Mark Lanegan but also the sweetness like Blake Shelton. That shall not in any way imply that Silas is singing about mainstream stuff like grandpa’s gun or the typical radio stuff on country radio stations. His songs talk about inner demons, his own shadow that he can’t face, or the time he met the devil, which sounds a bit like a mix of Robert Johnson’s disappearance and “The Devil’s advocate”. 

This is dark folk and outlaw country of the best imaginable kind and Silas certainly does not need to shy away from any other European artist of this genre.


​Thorsten

folk / indie / americana

From Glasgow we received the ep Comes a Time from a guy called Mark W Georgsson. In a previous live he was a bass player in an indie rock band called The Velveteens Saints. Not sure if that band still exists but Mark decided to make his own music and based on the result that was a real good idea. In 2016 he released a first genuine… country track. Country from Glasgow. Thinking about Glasgow we can’t really see how he can get in the right mindset but the music from that period seems indeed to come straight from the south of the VS. Only his accent betrays him. In 2017 he released a full album that was full of this type of Americana music. Since it became a bit quiet 

Apparently Mark was busy making music all along. Because mid august he released this ep called Comes a time. The goal was to come again with country, but that idea failed because on this ep we hear a lot of different music styles. The downside is that the ep misses a bit of cohesion but we forgive him, because there are some really nice tracks.

If you try it we would certainly recommend Ode  the Rvanna, the opening track. That was written a while ago but the lyrics changed a few times. Eventually the lyrics were based on an Instagram conversation with a landscape photographer from the Faroe Islands. The photographer was called Rvanna. Listening to it we thought about a desolate landscape with misty mountains and a rare bird as the only sign of life. If you need references, think about the atmospheric sound from Daniel Lanois on Acadie. 
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A song that might instantly charm a lot of people is One a kind. It is demonstrating a more poppy side of Georgsson. The song will make you think about Paul McCartney and that is no coincidence. He wrote the song one Sunday morning after seeing one of the most beautiful women that he’d ever seen walk into a bar the night before. When he was writing it he thought the song needed to sound a bit like McCartney so he asked the help of a friend who wrote the perfect piano –lines to achieve the goal. 

A last song we would recommend is Waiting For you. Again it is something completely different, again a more up-time track. We were spontaneously thinking about the almost forgotten 90 ties band The Boo Radleys or even a bit of Mika. We can‘t really explain but we are convinced that with some airplay this song would be picked up by many people.  The song is about realizing that it’s time to do what you really need to do, and then actually going ahead and doing it.  This song was why Georggson decided to create the ep and we are thankful for the fact that he did it 

The ep is released via Last night from Glasgow and can be found on all streaming platforms. If you prefer vinyl -like we do, it is nice to know that there are some rare copies on coloured vinyl for those that order fast. 


Wout