Album Review: Daughn Gibson- Me Moan

I don’t know at what point it was while I was listening to Daughn Gibson’s new LP, Me Moan, when I realized how gimmicky the whole thing is. That’s not to say that it’s a bad thing. But it’s also not a necessarily good thing. It’s just a thing you maybe want to keep in mind.

Doing big things happened very quickly for Gibson. A former truck driver, he seemingly came out of nowhere in the spring of 2012 thanks to a rep from Pitchfork for his debut LP, All Hell, and it’s charmingly odd, yet befuddlingly catchy single, “Tiffany Lou.” Shortly after—like within months, Gibson was signed to Sup Pop, and was put to work on a follow up. Me Moan is the fruit of that labor.

The easiest way to describe Gibson’s unique sound is this—imagine you have a time machine, and you go back to the mid 1950’s. After you get your mom and dad to dance together at the Enchantment Under The Sea dance, you find a young Johnny Cash, and you give him a sampler and a laptop loaded with Ableton Live, and tell him to go to town. Then you leave and come back to present day. Gibson, on his debut, found a somewhat unsettling, but always interesting way, to blend elements of old-school country & western music, with the modern trappings of true dubstep (like Burial.) On paper, this looks like a fucking trainwreck, but All Hell executed the concept rather well.

Me Moan isn’t a bad album by any means. Some of the songs are so catchy, they are ready for radio—although modern country radio would never touch this, and I don’t know if the NPR crowd would find this palatable. The album has far greater production values, thanks to all that Sub Pop money backing it. Me Moan forgoes much of the confrontational experimentation found on All Hell—the songs are much more structured to be, well, you know, songs. There’s still a lot of experimentation, or at least things to take note of, but they are all at a level that is slightly more accessible to a casual listen, but they are also slightly disconcerting—mostly thanks to the pitch shifted vocal samples, and the overall dusty, eerie vibe present throughout.

Aside from the unique style of electro-country that Gibson has patented, his most distinct characteristic his is very low baritone voice—which usually works really well, but occasionally he curls his words into such a heavy twang, they become silly sounding—like he’s making a caricature of a country & western performer. This is where it gets gimmicky, and it begins to detract from the positive aspects of the record.

Me Moan doesn’t get off to a rocky start, but it finds its pacing midway through—the halfway point, “Franco,” a song so surprisingly gorgeous you’ll do a double take, is hands down the best track on here—it also feels slightly derivative of, like, every popular song from the 80’s, but this is also what makes it incredible. Working into the back half of the record, you’ll also find two of the most radio friendly tracks—the soulful “You Won’t Climb”—giving off a “70’s or 80’s honky tonk, bathed in neon lights from beer signs” feel, and then “Kissin on The Blacktop,” which is so modern sounding, it actually seems like it would fit right in between your Taylor Swifts and your Keith Urbans on a mainstream country radio station.

Daughn Gibson- "Franco"

Daughn Gibson- "You Won't Climb"

For something as original and strange as this whole electro-country thing is, Me Moan takes some turns that were even surprising for me to hear—specifically the bagpipe that runs throughout the song “Mad Ocean.” And then there’s the lite FM beat on the closing track, “Into The Sea,” which works, but is so lighthearted when compared to how ominous and heavy Gibson lets some of these songs get.

As fun/interesting/weird as this album can be, it’s tough to sit through multiple listens from start to finish—and that’s mostly because of Gibson’s super-twangy vocal delivery—and it is a bit of a trick. Gibson is from Pennsylvania, and the last time I checked, an accent like this doesn’t come from the upper east side of the country.

Gibson has churned out two LPs in a little under a year, which is a pretty impressive feat for a relative newcomer. The Sub Pop co-sign will certainly help gain him a larger audience that may have slept on All Hell. Me Moan shows the giant growth that Daughn Gibson has made between his first and second album, so if you take away anything from this record, the take away is that the potential and promise for continued growth is there.

Me Moan is available July 9th, on LP and CD, courtesy of Sup Pop Records.