AEM054 Tony the Bookie Orchestra

The story goes that Anthony Con­falone (AKA “Tony the Bookie”, a moniker acquired in his long res­i­dency as the book­ing agent for Somerville, MA club PA’s Lounge, but one which nicely dou­bles as an indi­ca­tion of the kind of seedy, beer-soaked, mortality-heavy, mis­er­able bas­tard coun­try music Con­falone writes), before each take of every song on his debut full-length Tony the Bookie presents…The Tony the Bookie Orches­tra!, lifted a glass of Dewars to his mouth and took a swig. I prob­a­bly should have swapped the glass out for a bot­tle, and the Dewars for some kind of bour­bon, but hey, this is a music blog with some jour­nal­is­tic stan­dards.  There’s some­thing to the classi­ness of the scotch, though, for despite the roughshod mis­ery of a bunch of dudes howl­ing “on the day that you left me/I knew my life would never ever be the saaaaaaaaame” in a uni­son so wild there’s actu­ally about a major sec­ond span between the var­i­ous notes, Confalone’s songs are incred­i­bly well-written and well-crafted. He may be drunk, but he knows what he’s doing.

Con­falone describes the band as a bunch of weirdos try­ing to play coun­try music, and that’s about as accu­rate and con­cise a descrip­tion as you’re going to get from me. The genre touch­stones are all there: lyrics about sin and church bells, twangy lead gui­tars, ever-present death, plain­tive pedal steel, that high lone­some voice-cracking sound (altered here a bit by the fact that Con­falone actu­ally has quite a low voice), those sink­ing melis­mas at the end of each line, but the Bookie Orches­tra never sinks into pas­tiche or self-parody.  The musi­cal tem­plate may be coun­try, but the con­tent of the songs (mostly pain, like in any good coun­try song) res­onates beyond the frame­work in which they’re deliv­ered, and most impor­tantly, Con­falone never steps over the line into weird authen­tic­ity gam­ing by, say, singing in a put-on south­ern accent. This has been a pet peeve of mine ever since I noticed that about half of Amer­i­can rock bands today sing with fake British accents. Don’t get me wrong, I like Gang of Four too, guys, and there is always an extent to which influ­ence is uncon­sciously absorbed, which is fine.  Some­one writ­ing coun­try inspired music is likely to pick up a lit­tle bit of twang just like an aspir­ing sub­ur­ban MC is prob­a­bly going to pick up and throw around some slang he didn’t learn on his neatly land­scaped streets.  How­ever, it can quickly get out of hand and turn into some­thing that is at best dis­tract­ing and at worst offen­sive. What makes Confalone’s music so good is that it sounds not like an old coun­try record, but like new music made by peo­ple who lis­ten to a lot of great old coun­try records. When his voice rises to a qua­ver on the bridge of A-side “True Love” (titled sar­don­ically of course) and he belts “well it hurts so bad / just won’t go away,” it shares a com­mon method with coun­try music (sim­ple, some­what generic lyrics deliv­ered with a force that ren­ders them mys­te­ri­ously pow­er­ful), but it doesn’t really sound like coun­try music.

The cast of char­ac­ters on Tony the Bookie presents… is a ver­i­ta­ble who’s who of Boston rock, fea­tur­ing mem­bers and for­mer mem­bers of Drug Rug, Faces on Film, Hal­lelu­jah the Hills, Keys to the Streets of Fear, Bro­ken River Prophet, and Bane (yes, that Bane, but a long time ago), all of them lend­ing their instru­men­tal exper­tise and raw voices to a won­der­fully warm, ana­log record­ing done at a Med­ford stu­dio called The Soul Shop, and result­ing in a record that nods back to the exper­tise of stu­dio musi­cians in bygone days.  The musi­cian­ship on these tracks isn’t flashy, but the band, com­posed mainly of Elio Deluca, Patrick Gren­ham, Nick Brani­gan, and Eric Provon­sil, with plenty of spe­cial guests, hits every song with the loose­ness of musi­cians who are com­pletely as home on their instru­ments and the tight­ness required to keep every­thing propul­sive and fiery.

“True Love” is a clear sin­gle, the pop­pi­est and hook­i­est of all the songs on the album (which is inci­den­tally avail­able for free at the Bookie web­site). The song takes its time to expand over a sim­ple acoustic gui­tar pro­gres­sion. Grad­u­ally adding coiled drum fills and dreamy slide gui­tar, yet still mak­ing space for Confalone’s low croon, which always seems to stand on end with secret ten­sions. The first line is per­fectly dev­as­tat­ing mood-setter: I woke up all alone in the third year of our love. The ratch­et­ing up of inten­sity on the afore­men­tioned bridge, after two min­utes of verses, is just per­fect, with the vocals pour­ing right out of the keen­ing, dis­so­nant hurts so bad line and right into a high, con­so­nant oooh that leads the song back into the more even keeled melan­choly of the verses. Also check out that high pitched yelp in the back­ground of the end of the first ooh, right around 2:43.  This is a band of human beings play­ing their music in a room together, not a sequence of peo­ple adding tracks to a dis­em­bod­ied cloud of sound.

B-side “Rain Check” is a nasty, slow-burning 6/8 ‘fuck you’ jam, land­ing on the more angry side of mis­er­able. It starts with lyrics about block­ing out the light com­ing through the win­dows and pretty much just gets more pissed off from there. The lyrics on the ris­ing verse lines pour out on top of the time in a way that reminds me strangely of Harry Nils­son, and the recur­ring “I’ll take a rain check baby” is a per­fectly dry put down. The whole song makes a per­fect sound­track for that point in a break up where heart­break starts to cur­dle into anger, and I antic­i­pate, the next time I find myself in that sit­u­a­tion, get­ting drunk and howl­ing along with the cho­ruses. The sound of the whole band wail­ing on those high cli­maxes on the bridge is enough to send shiv­ers down your spine.

Tony the Bookie and com­pany have put together an album that car­ries on the booze-soaked mis­ery of the best old coun­try music while fill­ing out that arche­typal sound with their own inven­tions and idio­syn­crasies. It’s the way any music that takes inspi­ra­tion from older gen­res (and who doesn’t?) should be made, full of respect and love for the old sounds with­out any bor­ing attempts at emu­la­tion. It’s peo­ple like this who under­stand that the best homage to the great music of the past is to keep build­ing on it, to make it your own like all those great musi­cians did themselves.

Gabe Birn­baum

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