Amigo the Devil Album Review: Born Against
(Liars Club/Regime Music Group)
On his second album as Amigo the Devil, singer-songwriter Danny Kiranos takes on the persona of murderers, some real and some fictional, but gives a little of himself in the process. Appropriately, in his singing, the instrumentation, and Beau Bedford’s production, the theatricality is turned to 11. If the record opens with the somewhat lo-fi, introspective delivery you’ve come to expect from Amigo the Devil, Kiranos’ about-face midway through introduces you to Born Against’s statement of purpose. From the perspective of a drunk, he sings, “I’ll show you the pain of getting clean,” with a Roy Orbison-like tenor, over a huge choral background and electric guitar. It’s this difficulty of toeing the line between life’s margins and mainstream that epitomizes Born Against.
In making a record about killers but also about himself, Kiranos effectively shows the dark things humans are capable of, to themselves and to others. On “Quiet as a Rat”, he describes a scene that would find a home in Mare of Easttown, a girl overdosing in a photo booth at a bar, only to be found at last call, strangers gawking at the pictures she took. “Everyone treats commandments like more of a bucket list,” Kiranos observes, decrying our hypocrisy around religion over warped marching band instrumentation. “I never knew how much a man could hate until I read that letter,” he sings on “Drop For Every Hour”, in which he dreams about killing real-life killer, rapist, and cannibal Albert Fish, referencing the infamous letter he sent to victim Grace Budd’s mother. Yet, on the follow-up, “Better Ways to Fry a Fish”, over a metronomic, harmonica-imbued ragtime melody, Kiranos describes how he kills (or would kill) Albert Fish as an audience claps, forcing the listener to ask the uncomfortable question: Is this any less morbid? Of course, that dark humor shines throughout Born Against, and Kiranos takes advantage of our expectations. “Murder at the Bingo Hall” sets up to detail a gruesome scene but turns out to be about him just killing it at Bingo.
Born Against might be a little too much without some perspective, and thankfully Kiranos provides it on a few of the more instrumentally raw tracks, like the acoustic “Different Anymore” and banjo stomp “24K Casket”, an ode to not fearing death. It’s the final track, the gorgeous “Letter From Death Row”, that hits hardest, as the narrator finds remorse for whatever he both did to someone and couldn’t do for his loved one. “In less than 24 hours, I’ll just be dirt and flowers / I hope it brings the families peace,” Kiranos sings, elsewhere declaring, “I hope that you move on to find somebody to give you what I couldn’t.” On an album chock full of details both grisly and off-color humorous, that Kiranos ends on a more ambiguous note provides a welcome balance. Okay, we might not all be killers, but what’s more human than regret?
