Hiss Golden Messenger Shines its Cult Credentials at Tipitina's

Hiss Golden Messenger at Tipitina’s, by Steven Hatley

The Durham, NC-based band steered into its idiosyncratic impulses in New Orleans recently.

Photographer Steven Hadley inadvertently hit on something when he played around with some of his shots of Hiss Golden Messenger at Tipitina’s. The sepia-toned image felt like the band that some in the crowd felt like they were seeing, one rooted in old time-y values with roots in what critic Greil Marcus called “the Old, Weird America.” Marcus coined the phrase when writing about The Anthology of American Folk Music, a collection of folk songs that in many cases were rooted in the specific lives of people who lived in towns that no longer exist. With the references gone, the songs became inexplicable and oddly modern in their fragmented storytelling.

Hiss Golden Messenger at Tipitina’s, by Steven Hatley

I wonder if others saw this band onstage. The Grateful Dead and its inheritors made this music their touchstone before taking it to more psychedelic places. Hiss Golden Messenger didn’t jam or go exploring the possibilities in their folk-based rock, but singer MC Taylor built time into the songs for guitarist Chris Boehner and particularly keyboard player Alex Fribush to work out. Neither added new stars to the pantheon of soloists, but both used their time well, making statements that made sense in the songs and contributed a thought worth adding.

Fribush’s solos and the way the band accompanied them brought The Band to mind, which makes sense. The Band covered enough ground that it’s hard to find something that a band in this field does that they didn’t do first. And The Basement Tapes that they recorded with Bob Dylan started Marcus in his exploration of the Old Weird America.

Hiss Golden Messenger’s MC Taylor, by Steven Hatley

That’s the band that was actually onstage. Taylor’s hat and beard called back to the early 1970s and the dominant echo was Little Feat, which Hiss underlined by covering “Dixie Chicken.” To my mind, Little Feat after Lowell George straddled the line between song and exploration with a resolute jaw. They wouldn’t choke the life out of a song by nailing it down, but they wouldn’t stray too far from it either. At Tipitina’s, Hiss Golden Messenger made musical moments pay off, but nobody got so far out that anyone got confused.

Taylor told Goldmine, “a really big band for me in the way that they played with each other is Little Feat,” but he didn’t think Jump for Joy, their most recent album, reflected his love of the band beyond that. He similarly hedged when asked if Jump for Joy is funky, answering the question with a question. “What is ‘funk’ really?” he asked. “’Funk is just a really deep groove, and there’s certainly a lot of that on this record.” Since funk is also all about the way the instruments and players lock up, it may also be where the Little Feat really comes in. In concert, part of the pleasure for the crowd came from watching the pleasure the band had playing together.

It was easy to hear why fans remain faithful to Hiss, even when the songs would have benefited from a little more musical definition. There’s nothing like a band that you can call yours even if others don’t get it, and Hiss Golden Messenger fill that role perfectly. Lyrics are an important part of Taylor’s songs, but his high, soft soulful rasp didn’t spell anything out too clearly. There’s an idiosyncratic privacy in his songs and performance, one that leaves some people out and prompts those who get it to hang on all the tighter.

Add to that a tendency toward rising melodies and you have an act made for cult status now. These are easy times to feel bleak in, and a band that musically chooses to be upbeat in its way feels a little subversive. It helps that Hiss Golden Messenger proudly doesn’t fit neatly into any genre.

“I would say that folk and traditional music are very important parts of the DNA of the music that I make,” Taylor told the Charleston City Paper. “I will never disavow that because I love that type of music. But there are also a million other things that go into my music. It’s a complex stew of different kinds of music that go into it, and I’m fine with that.”