It’s odd writing this review knowing that the album’s creators are merely hours away from no longer existing. In case you haven’t been paying attention, Chicago duo Puerto Muerto, consisting of Christa Meyer and Tim Kelley, are playing their last show tonight at the Empty Bottle. And it’s quite a shame seeing how their latest release, Drumming For Pistols, is an excellent excercise in painfully honest emotional salience told through a veil of midwestern blues.

“Oh Daddy, Oh Daddy, why’d you do those things to me?” sings Christa Meyer in the disturbingly catchy duet “Tamar,” which is a clever reinterpretation of the bible story in which Puerto Muerto’s male half Tim Kelley portrays Judah.

It’s that sort of dark imagery over tension-filled violins and twangy, alt-country guitar that makes Drumming For Pistols such an immediate listen, and perhaps why the band are calling it quits only weeks after the record was released. It takes a lot of courage to write a song so piercing – even if the account is a retelling of a classic Bible tale – because both Meyer and Kelley have to take on roles that have so much inner turmoil and pain.

The more the listener delves into the album, the duo’s deterioration as a married couple that plagued the Drumming For Pistols writing process becomes clearer. Although, perhaps plagued is the wrong word choice as the music definitely did not suffer.

“The Bell Ringer” features some harrowing vocals courtesy of Meyer – she sounds as though she could breakdown in tears at any second – over heart-breaking bell hits. While “Arcadia” opens with big Fleetwood Mac-like ’70s arena rock guitar work from Kelley, it shifts to a melodic, shimmering guitar bridge until collapsing back into the big fuzzy riffs where it all began.

The album’s centerpiece is the delicate, slow burning, “Vermillion Sky,” in which Meyer sings “I was the torch/ which led you here/ to your house/ beside the ocean/ storms crashing down/ while dampening my light/ but my smoke was a lingering light,” until Kelley enters with a refrain of “Into the the wide/ Vermillion Sky” showcases the duo’s passionate and metaphoric imagery.

“Hurting Now” is one of the few Kelley solo takes in which he seems to bare his soul by lamenting about a lost love over soft acoustic guitar strums and drifting piano strikes. Then the closing track, “Goodbye To The End,” is probably the most fitting way to end the album given the circumstances and turbulent times surrounding the its creation, but the song is more of a statement that sometimes goodbyes are met with the softening of regrets and are necessary for moving forward.

Generally, Drumming For Pistols is a dark affair filled with thematic elements of lost love, collapsing relationships, death, violence and learning how to say goodbye. But it’s the stripped down, bare bones instrumentation and bright production that brings these themes from being only sad and tortuous to sad and tortuous yet melodically enticing and strangely satisfactory at the album’s conclusion.

Drumming For Pistols could be the soundtrack that encompasses that one horrible day where absolutely nothing goes right, but in the end, once the pain is accepted, it’ll only make you stronger.
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Catch Puerto Muerto perform at the Empty Bottle tonight, Monday, February 22, for the Drumming For Pistols record release show, which will also be the band’s final show. The show begins at 9:30 p.m. and is FREE!
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“Hurting Now” Music Video for Puerto Muerto from T. Foley on Vimeo.