#Blanche #alt-country #Americana #folk blues #Southern gothic #country folk #gothic folk
The packaging for ‘If We Can’t Trust the Doctors’, the debut album by Detroit-based Blanche, includes an old time medicine ad for Blanche’s Nepenthe. The elixir claims to “induce forgetfulness of sorrow, dolor, ennui and wretchedness for those afflicted with melancholia, fits and tempers, neurasthenia, or the vapors”. The music that Blanche makes could easily be the promotional soundtrack for the Nepenthe sales pitch, the accompaniment to its traveling medicine show. It’s a collection of near-spooky gothic country-blues, dirges for sanity and laments for optimism wrapped in reverb, banjos, autoharp, pedal steel, and dank Poe atmospherics. Led X-ishly by the husband and wife duo of Dan and Tracee Mae Miller, Blanche plays old-timey Midwestern twang with one foot in authenticity and the other in well-versed satire.
Blanche was formed after the Millers’s short-lived band Two-Star Tabernacle called it quits in the late ’90s. (Another member of Two-Star Tabernacle — Jack White — would go on to find surprising success with the White Stripes, and later used members of Blanche as Loretta Lynn’s backing band for the critically acclaimed Van Lear Rose.) ‘If We Can’t Trust the Doctors’ was released by Detroit label Cass Records in 2003, was nominated for the 2004 Shortlist Music Prize, and is now finding a new life through distribution with V2 Records. Blanche is not yet a touchstone of the alt-country community, but it shows major promise as a potential bearer of folk fringe oddities. From: https://www.popmatters.com/blanche-ifwecant-2495847373.html
Writhing and preening like a fistful of wild-eyed Southern preachers, Blanche sells sweet snake oil by the wagonload on their debut release ‘If We Can't Trust the Doctors’. Fronted by the enigmatic Dan Miller (the artist formerly known as Goober in the hillbilly-punk prototype Goober and the Peas) and his ethereal wife Tracee, the band weaves a hypnotic blend of old-timey medicine show theatrics and down-home acoustic pickin', all threaded through with a spooky string of murder ballads and women scorned. Along with assistance from Brendan Benson and His Name Is Alive's Warn DeFever, the album was handcrafted by the understated Dave Feeny, whose production reveals layers of banjo, pedal steel, autoharp, and subtly distorted guitars, all toothing together like rusting gears in a Model 'A' Ford rolled off the Detroit lines a century ago. While on the surface the songwriting seems straightforward and simple, the pages within peel back like crumbling photos in a black paper photo album lost in the drawers during the Eisenhower era.
While much of the energy from the album seems tied to the power of the old church, ‘If We Can't Trust the Doctors’ is no gospel album, but rather it taps deep into Greil Marcus' "old, weird America" of dusty 78's on Vocalion and Okeh, and the dusty-toothed wayfaring strangers of the Depression era circuit. The amazing thing about the album is that for all of its folkways influences, it still feels very much a contemporary work; certain to be found on iPods and peer-to-peer lists worldwide. Shining deep underneath the dust of the last hundred years are little glints of Blanche's sunnier moments, and while the band certainly proves that every silver lining has a cloud, the album is perfectly spooky and uplifting, chilling and rewarding, haunting and beautiful. From: https://www.allmusic.com/album/if-we-cant-trust-the-doctors-mw0000396906
