The Singles Bar: Raygun Carver slinks into new love with ‘Jesus, He’s Right’
The Americana musician loses himself in love with a new spaghetti western style tune.
Welcome to The Singles Bar, a review series focused on new single and song releases.
In the wake of prolific filmmaker Sergio Leone (The Last Days of Pompeii, the Dollars trilogy), often cited as the inventor of what would become known as the spaghetti western, the sub-genre exploded in the 1960s and carried influential trademarks that’d have lasting footprints clearly outlined in the present. Today, stylistic traces can be uncovered with such modern films as Kill Bill and Django Unchained, as well as in various strands of popular music. Beautifully haunting poeticism and composition also seeped into many Leone soundtracks and subsequently inspired generations of musicians in the ensuing decades, a niche buried somewhere between classic country & western music and Americana traditions. Situated among the frays is Raygun Carver (real name Michael Soiseth) and his dusty cowboy aesthetic.
With a new song called “Jesus, He’s Right,” sticky with saloon-saturated orbs and moaning guitar, Carver stretches is limbs through space and time on an altogether spooky, unsettling performance. “It’s not a religious song,” he stresses over email. But in utilizing a biblical figure, he is able to crack open a love story that can be aptly traced through ancient civilizations and into the world as we know it now. Out of the Pacific Northwest, Carver casts a long, weary shadow across the production, which contains a horn’s soul-vibrating wail with a guitar and percussion glowing around him. “I told him that I would never survive / That I had to leave to get out alive / He said, ‘It’s just fear of falling in love’ / That you were the one I was afraid of,” he unfurls a downtrodden yarn in an attempt to assuage the looming potency of romance.
Backed with fellow musicians Brennan Van Blair (stand-up bass) and Joe Vogel (drums), Carver peels the emotions from his bone as a gopher snake shedding skin in the scorched, sun-baked desert. “You’re love is worth dying for,” he later resolves himself to his lot in life, one bound by his one, true love and a task he confronts valiantly and unconditionally. “Jesus, he’s right…” escapes his lips as an eagle flying high over the barren earth, a caterwaul for the end of time.
“Jesus, He’s Right” anchors Carver’s new album, Moon Fields Yawning, expected later this year.
Listen below:
