There are times in your musical life when you have to cop to being late to the party. This happens to me far more often than I would care to admit, but I’ll bet if most people are honest with themselves, it’s not that rare an occurrence. So it was only earlier this year that I heard of Christian Kiefer for the first time. The occasion was a collaboration called The Black Dove released on the Tompkins Square label and featuring Kiefer along with trad-dark-folk revivalist chanteuse Sharron Kraus. That effort was a potent song cycle chronicling a doomed love affair between residents of the here and now and the hereafter. In my broader exposure to Keifer’s work that followed it became clear that excursions touching both upon the world and the world of spirits were common. For example, on 2000’s beautifully understated Welcome To Hard Times, Kiefer painted a picture of a lonely and desolate hardscrabble frontier and the wizened characters that inhabit the West’s mythical past. On 2002’s Exodust, Kiefer evoked the swirling depression era dustbowl in a semi-composed instrumental epic.
Czar Nicholas Is Dead does little to interfere with Kiefer’s site and time specific explorations of sparse and unforgiving landscapes. The album nominally “takes place” in Russia in July of 1918 after the Bolshevik revolution ended first the Romanov Empire and later the royal family itself, but it’s clear that some events reference the bloody battles that occurred a year earlier. Soldiers fall and bleed out on icy battlefields, wind whistles through barren trees, and melancholy sounds abound. It’s all very grand in scale, with not a lot of warmth and cheer in the air. But it is also hardly a sterile historical exercise. The recurring themes of an empire in decay, and imperial soldiers laying broken in a conflict doomed to failure hold particular relevance to today’s political situation. The music unfolds as a series of loosely related vignettes played out with spare arrangements where what is not played becomes as important as what is. The pieces are not sequenced according to any linear narrative and this allows interweaving of more mundane everyday portraits to rub up against darker events. Always however, the pitiless landscape informs every moment as if the history of that July were dictated in advance by its back drop.
“Yurovsky’s Lament” (inspired by the Romanov’s primary executioner) pits clattery percussion and woozy violin against a slow moving miasma of guttural guitar phrasings. Following that is “Koptyaki Road, Night” which features patient guitar figures that are not unlike Ry Cooder’s more cinematic efforts. One can feel lazy warmth in the twilight air, but before long, the night creeps in via scrapes of violin and an ambient electronic undercurrent. All warmth has bled out of the scene by the start of “15 Degrees” with its harsh core of leaden air framed by a skeletal cello and echoing sparse drums. “Kalmykov (Poppies)” is a hallucinogenic dreamscape where half-articulated overlapping voices drift in and out of consciousness in a heavenly choir. The effect is benignly seductive until you realize the dream probably belongs to some soldier who is being medicated to the point of oblivion to tame the pain of an obliterated leg. “On Suffering Grief” is a concise seesawing violin and bazouki lament. The “July 21: Ipatiev Returns Home” frames the carnage that the owner of the house where the Romanovs were executed must have discovered a few days after the slaughter. Featuring slow thudding percussion, violin lament and slightly twanging guitar, this could easily be a recently uncovered Morricone theme.
As a somewhat lighter counterpoint, “Dubinushka”’s single notes of resonant acoustic guitar arrive amidst dogs barking, birds twittering, and vinyl crackle. The song and its peculiar field accompaniment are heard as if across the divide of time itself. The reprieve of normalcy is brief however as “The Firing Squad” fades in as a keening minor key violin dirge that wails painfully along before crystallizing around a background of naked snare rattle and booming percussion; violent death cloaked in military ritual. “The Politburo Dreams of the Urals” features grainy staccato Russian shortwave radio broadcasts punctuating crumbling guitar and backwards masked cello while “Troika” re-imagines a classic Russian folk melody with tight vocal harmonies that are eerily similar to that of the Sparhawks although the music behind them grinds on at an even more glacial pace.
This is a chilling and harrowing account of a chilling and harrowing time that resonates more deeply with me in the colder days of November than it did when I first heard it in late summer. The scope, grandeur, and sheer crushing mercilessness of the Russian geography are distilled into what emerges as a powerful if disturbing musical retelling of a pivotal time in 20th Century history. Recommended listening for those soon-to-be-upon-us winter days and nights.
