Widerschall and Brooks.
“God Cried: Arson!” — the opening track from One Eye Is The Sun, One Eye Is The Moon, by Vaca Sagrada — starts with a splash of horns, guitar, bass and drums setting up an easy, bluesy swing. It all feels breezy, almost happy-go-lucky. it doesn’t prepare the listener for what the singer sings: “When God made the world he used a compass and a square / A compass and a square and he made the earth, fire and air / then he made water / Mankind disappointed God tipped his giant cup / spilled all the water down / and he drowned them.” The horns respond to those unspooling lines with a few descending riffs, almost as if they’re chuckling, shrugging their shoulders. Oh, well!
The New Haven-based music project Vaca Sagrada is born of a musical collaboration between David Brooks and Jeff Widerschall, who played together in The Streams in the 1990s. Widerschall is also the original drummer for Miracle Legion. Brooks is a chef and baker by trade and teaches at Gateway Community College. He’s also the father of Tate Brooks, of The Problem With Kids Today. To help explore their vision, Brooks and Widerschall enlist the full horn section of David “Doc” Watson on tenor and baritone sax, Daryl Dixon on alto sax, Freddie Hendrix on trumpet, and Dan Levine on trombone; Julia Autumn Ford on vocals; and Tracy Walton on upright bass and vocals, who also recorded and co-produced the album with Brooks and Widerschall. As the band’s bio reads, “this latest collaboration debuts ambitious songs weaving cinematic tales engulfed with characters from Old Testament figures, Cormac McCarthy’s existential west, Rumi, Crowley and William Blake.”
What the bio doesn’t touch on is the sense of sly sarcasm, if not outright humor embedded in the music and lyrics. “God Cried: Arson!,” for example, not only features those horns, but has the wherewithal to rhyme “hard-on” with “pardon” in describing the original sin that expelled Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden. The next track, “The Great Divider,” uses a shifting harmonic structure to deliver an unsettling, Old Testament message. “Born in the time of a great divider / he drew up a plan to make the river wider / all the poor get washed away / return the land to a clean slate / bring forth a boat and fill it with slaves / the time for work has come today,” Brooks sings. Lest we think that fire and brimstone are all in the past, at the end of the song he tags the final chorus with a sardonic twist: “there’s always another to make your crossing wider.”
“Starlight,” meanwhile, may be inspired by famous occultist Aleister Crowley, but Brooks and Widerschall choose to convey the message of the lyrics in a musical medium somewhere between country and jazz, fueled by Watson’s sax until a dirty guitar solo takes the song out. “Border Song” features stabbing acoustic guitar and spacious percussion that suddenly turn propulsive to tell a southwestern story of survival inspired by Cormac McCarthy. “Particles of Light” is the spaciest song yet, as Brooks switches to a spoken-word vocal style for the verses while the music creates a lushly airy vibe around him.
And that’s just the first half of the album. To find out what’s in store in the second half, check it out when Vaca Sagrada releases the full album this Friday, Dec. 3. Until then, the sun-baked, winking noir Vaca Sagrada has cooked up is more than enough to make us feel some dusty Gothic desert, even as winter sets in.
Vaca Sagrada’s One Eye Is The Sun, One Eye Is The Moon is available on Bandcamp.
