You know where you are from the opening flourish of Joe Flood’s “Hard Time Blues,” as a warbling harmonica cuts a line through a swinging rhythm from two guitars, a bass, and janky percussion. “It’s been hard times,” Flood sings. “They cut me open, sewed me up / I’m still not quite the same / People dying / Friends and loved ones up and gone / And only life to blame.” The lyrics talk about hardship, but Flood sings with the easy confidence of a seasoned pro. It’s all a setup, as it turns out, for a chorus that opens out into lush territory, and the lyrics suddenly become hopeful.
“But for now the birds still sing, the winter turns to spring / We wake up never knowing what the day will bring / Although the world like us is full of suffering / If you’ve got soul you know you’re part of everything / And everything like you is trying hard to lose / These hard time blues,” Flood sings. It’s a compassionate stance, buoyed by the music, which suggests, in its gentle way, that maybe losing those blues is really possible.
Flood was born in Middletown and currently lives in Hamden, but has made an astonishing number of stops along the way. He played jazz and blues on Paris streets, wrote music with Levon Helm, worked with Blues Traveler, and has rubbed elbows with New Orleans and Americana musical royalty. He has a recording career that spans decades, from the 1990s albums Hotel Albert and Mumbo Gumbo to 2015’s Songs from the Bend in the River, exploring the music of 19th-century Middletown-based songwriters Henry Clay Work, Reginald DeKoven. and Edward Barrett — all famous in their lifetimes and fallen into obscurity today.
All that musical experience comes to bear on All Roads, which Flood officially released recently with a show at Cafe Nine. “I’m in a Hole” rides a deep bluesy strut straight out of Louisiana to convey a blues that sounds like it could have been written 100 years ago, in the best sense. “Every Man Has a Monkey” trades electric instruments for violin, accordion, and piano to make a groove that sounds like New Orleans might have sounded before it got electricity. “What’s Left?” partakes of a slow Cuban feel to create a smoky atmosphere for some of Flood’s most expressive singing and playing on the album.
The album couldn’t close any better than with the country-fried two-stepper “Honky Tonk in My Mind.” “I cant forget you / but I bet you never would have left me / If only you had met me / At the honky tonk in my mind,” Flood sings with good-time verve. By the end of the song, it’s clear that it’s a bait-and-switch; with All Roads, Flood has put us all on the guest list for his club, somewhere between New Haven and New Orleans, and it’s a place you don’t really want to leave.
Where Joe Flood grounds his music in the rich traditions of American music, in his new album Cruelty of Yaks, New Haven-based musician Jake Gagne — a.k.a. Skeleton Yaks — is more interested, at first, in disorientation. “Say Goodbye (to Rendered Water” starts with a buzzing, windy sound that could be machinery or a whisper digitally altered, or something else entirely. It cuts out to a shimmering electronic landscape and thundering, distant bass, a vocal chopped into near-incomprehensibility: “Symmetrical, you visit me in my jar / While I climb to / The house of all translators’ great regrets,” Gagne sings. “The birth of Bonk is here! / Are you afraid?”
“Say Goodbye” is just the opening salvo. The next song, “69% Experimentalist,” is built on crashing synths and voices that ebb and flow into one another and recede. “Tears Out of Space” is a straight-ahead pop song disrupted by fractured blasts of sound before settling down into a chill vibe that feels both earned and a little sarcastic, given the tone of the lyrics (“Electrify the house / Magnetize the spine / Simplify my life / You’re stuck in my eye”). Sure enough, before the song ends there’s a final disruption. “Yak’s Skeleton Key” gets almost ambient.
As Cruelty of Yaks continues, the soundscape only expands, each song containing shift after shift in instrumentation, tempo, tone, and sound. The collage-like aspect of the music is mirrored in the lyrics, as on “You’re Baby” (“When you’re all alone in the flying code / Little green heart in the master’s mode / Networks of sparks in the access zone / It’s a poem, a rising song / A song for baby,” Gagne sings). What pulls it all together is an overarching tone that is somehow lush and inviting, and at the same time, distant and abstract. It’s music that never quite lets you find your footing. Maybe that makes it easier to get lost in it.