Ben Blackwell – I Remember When All This Was Trees
Cass Records
When his house burned down a couple years ago, Dirtbombs drummer (and occasional Metro Times contributor) and scene fixture Ben Blackwell left Detroit for Nashville to help run Third Man Records, prompting a local “Where Is Ben Blackwell?” bumper sticker campaign. Turns out Blackwell misses Detroit too: His first solo record consists entirely of odes to Detroit, from acoustic folk to takes on hip hop and electronic music.
He may be nostalgic, but apocalyptic themes pervade — “I Can’t See Through the Plywood Windows” could be about his or hundreds of other burnt-out houses of Detroit, while “Gordon Newton, 1970” is a burst of guitar noise as abstract as the junk assemblages of the Cass Corridor artist it’s named after. “The Nain Rouge” is a “Sympathy for the Devil” parody about a little known red demon of local lore said to appear whenever bad happens, sinking the Edmund Fitzgerald, throwing the brick that started the ’67 riots … even bringing the People Mover, among other references. It’s a rough and scattered collection, and Blackwell’s never too precious — he recorded the album directly to his laptop — but it’s a worthy sonic diary of someone who’ll always be a Detroiter.
This article appears in Feb 9-15, 2011.
