The Curse of Midnight Mary

Album review

As Loren Connors explains on the back cover of this CD, "In 1981 I took my tape reorder to the graveyard where the legendary Midnight Mary's grave lies" in the Evergreen Cemetery of New Haven, CT. Here he taped himself playing acoustic guitar and singing, though the cassette was lost for close to 30 years before it was found and transferred to CD for this reissue. All nine of the songs on the 31-minute disc are improvised pieces, labeled "Chant 1," "Chant 2," and so forth all the way up to "Chant 9." All nine of them feature the spooky, indeed creepy, folk-avant-garde-blues guitar swoops that are a Connors trademark, the guitarist vocalizing wordlessly in what might indeed be fairly termed a sort of chant-moaning style. None of this should surprise those familiar with some of the several dozen albums Connors has put out (sometimes under the name Loren Mazzacane), though this is a little on the basic side in terms of both performance and, more notably, its lo-fi sound. Though Connors has an impressively idiosyncratic and primitive take on the rural blues style, such is the rough fidelity that it certainly couldn't be recommended as the best or first place to acquaint yourself with it. Nor is it extremely varied in tune or execution from piece to piece, though this again will not surprise those familiar with much of his previous work. Though there is indeed a haunting graveyard feel to much of this, as if Connors is summoning troubled restless below-ground spirits in the cemetery itself, there are better recorded documents of the musician to check out that also exhibit these qualities.
© Richie Unterberger /TiVo