Country Mouse
Short Life of Trouble
Independent
2022
“Country Mouse are four feral forest creatures brought together by a shared love of outsider music and the unlikely coincidence of each having a body to bury. They have conspired, collaborated, and shared shovels ever since. They create low tone psychedelic doom-folk with Appalachian and punk rock over and undertones. They sound best in forests and look better in the dark.”
So it is, with a dose of his typically scampish humour, Country Mouse’s leader Dwayne Strohm describes his band on its Bandcamp page. Yet, concerning such as violent death, heroin addiction, and orphanhood among the subject matter on the band’s long-awaited debut, A Short Life of Trouble, you’ll find little humour in their pitch-dark material – even of the gallows variant. And sonically, think along the lines of 16 Horsepower’s brooding alt.country infused with the gothic spirit of The Gun Club, Nick Cave, Bad Livers et al., so should those touchstones appeal, then Country Mouse is most definitely worth your time.
This fiery 4-piece is a formidable live act based in Nanaimo on Vancouver Island. I first saw the band perform at a block party in my street in 2017, and so intense was their set that I felt sandblasted at its conclusion. Atop the rock-hard rhythm section of drummer Alicia Murray (‘Bashing, Crashing, Smashing,’ as credited on the album) and bassist Alain Champagne (‘Low Notes, High Value’), duel lead vocalist Strohm (‘Banjo, Bad Vibes’) hollered and attacked his fuzzed-up banjo while his foil, Ben Zyakin (‘Strings, Sings, Manic Things’) howled out his vocal and shredded on electric guitar as if his life depended on it.
At that time, they had just one track recorded, an 8-minute, live swamp-blues cover of the traditional folk ballad I Wish My Baby Was Born, inspired by the stark Tim Eriksen, Riley Baugus, and Tim O’Brien version, as it appeared in the Cold Mountain soundtrack. The next we heard from Country Mouse was four years later, in March 2021, with a fierce take on the traditional Country Blues on a split release with kindred spirits and frequent stage-mates, Tremblers of Sevens. However, while over the eighteen or so months following the block party, the band completed work on A Short Life of Trouble, until now, it’s been ‘languishing in the can,’ as Strohm puts it – but, man, was it worth the wait.
The 18th-century nursery rhyme Who Killed Cock Robin (?) has been recorded by acts as diverse as Steeleye Span’s Tim Hart, the Mike Sammes Singers, and Peggy Seeger, but – doing full justice to what, although framed in the animal kingdom, is essentially a murder ballad – never has there been a version as baleful as Country Mouse’s, which kicks off their debut album. The tone is thus set and is followed by a breathless version of the gospel-blues standard, Motherless Children, on which all four musicians are on fire, with particular praise due to Murray’s thundering drums and Zyakin’s blazing slide guitar work. With time for just a single breath between the tracks, Murray counts in the equally impassioned Country Blues, Zyakin again giving it everything on lead vocal.
Next up, Strohm takes centre stage on one of his potent originals, the breakneck Nanaimo Mill Shooting. It tells the tragic tale of an event that, due to the regional rarity of its distressing severity, traumatised the city, and far beyond its borders when it unfolded from around 7:00 am on April 30th, 2014. Intent on revenge for being laid off, Kevin Addison – a former employee of Nanaimo’s Western Forest Products sawmill – embarked upon a shooting spree at the mill, killing his former co-workers Michael Lunn and Fred McEachern, and wounding two others, Tony Sudar and Earl Kelly. On December 2nd, 2016, Addison was jailed for life for two counts of first-degree murder and two counts of attempted murder, without eligibility for parole for 25 years. From both first (as Addison) and third-person perspectives, Strohm has framed the horrifying incident within a punked-up bluegrass setting as sonically violent as befits the theme. Yet he approaches it with great humanity, especially in the first two verses, in which, in simple terms, he attempts to rationalise what may have driven Addison, as a worker and family man, to crack and commit murder:
Oh, he lived in South Nanaimo / Worked the mill for many a year / All he owned earned with his backbone / A wife and daughter he held dear
Hard times fell, he fell harder / He lost his job, he lost his pay / He lost his home, he lost his family / He lost his mind, he lost his way
Make no mistake, though, that while these verses may display a degree of understanding for the killer’s motive, like anyone in Nanaimo Strohm was as dismayed by the tragedy, as shocked by the cold brutality of Addison’s actions, and as heartbroken for Addison’s victims and their families as anyone else:
He walked up to the mill that morning / He shot poor Michael Lunn down / He didn’t stop, just kept on walking / He shot everyone he found
He found and shot poor Fred McEachern / Left him for dead and walked away / Two men were hit but kept on living / One more was sent beneath the clay.
It’s a day I’ll never forget, for sure. The news was broken to me by a customer at my workplace, and it was all I could do to concentrate on getting through the remainder of my shift.
After three consecutive flat-out barnstormers, the pace may shift to downtempo, but there is absolutely no lightening of mood in the lyrical hellscape of the following track, Heroin:
When the smack begins to flow, I really don’t care anymore / About them politicians makin’ crazy sounds / And everybody putting everybody else down / And all them dead bodies piled up in mounds
Do you want it darker? The gloominess continues with the loping six-and-a-half minutes of Dead to Me, the first 3:43 of which are occupied by a circular banjo motif, gradually building into a grinding full-band wig-out before Zyakin enters the fray to deliver the song’s two verses, separated by another extended passage of intense roots-rock disorder. It’s incredible.
Concluding proceedings are a pulverising rendition of Woody Guthrie’s Hangknot (Slipknot), featuring a despairing, guttural Zyakin vocal and the Appalachian standard, Oh, Death. Previously recorded dozens of times in a vast span of styles ranging from Ralph Stanley to Diamanda Galás, apart from versions by such as the Illinois extreme metal band A Hill to Die Upon or Denver doom metal outfit Khemmis, much like their approach to Who Killed Cock Robin (?) there cannot be any/many renditions as radically funereal and bass-heavy as the 8:34 of Country Mouse’s interpretation. Strohm and Zyakin trade increasingly unhinged vocal lines as the tension builds against shards of squalling electric guitar, unsettling background noise, and Murray and Champagne’s tough-as-nails, head-nodding rhythm. Awesome, frankly.
Self-produced, engineered by Myke Hall (Tremblers of Sevens), and mastered by Wolf Parade/Anunnaki drummer Arlen Thompson, as should be expected, A Short Life of Trouble is housed within a grim sleeve design, albeit beautifully drawn by Atana Mae, who usually fills Champagne’s bass boots at local live shows. Next to a store named ‘Olson’s’ whose windows are all smashed, the rundown ‘Fergus Theatre,’ with a skeleton in the ticket booth, is hosting a ‘Country Mous’ show – the ‘e’ has dropped to the cracked, littered sidewalk – while a giant, evil-looking rat with a bindle scurries past. A demented looking male character observes the scene from a window above the Fergus, a noose clearly visible a few feet from him.
The image is certainly indicative of the heavy, grimy musical content within, yet despite the cheerlessness of lyrics exploring life’s darkest corners, to my ears the sound of Country Mouse is also as thrilling and beautiful as rock ‘n’ roll gets. ‘Play it loud,’ Strohm implores on his band’s Bandcamp page, and as much of a cliché as that is, it truly is the only way to listen to music of such power as this.
A Short Life of Trouble is available now from Bandcamp: https://countrymouse.bandcamp.com/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/countrymouseband/