Singer-songwriter Curtis McMurtry has a strange and sophisticated sense of humor. He’s wry and funny one minute, then stabs the listener in the back with a mean lyric the next. The narrators of the songs on his latest album, The Pollen & The Rot, are deceitful little snits. Their selfishness and nasty traits may seem charming at first in their blunt honesty, but the characters soon devolve into inherently selfish people. That’s McMurtry’s point. They are all in each of us.
The Pollen & The Rot is McMurtry’s first of four forthcoming albums inspired by the four seasons. April is the cruelest month indeed! In the press notes, he wrote, “If springtime were a group of people, they would be impatient, horny, and brutal.” While most songwriters see spring as a time of hope, growth, change, and beauty, McMurtry casts the season as when sex and longing overwhelm the senses and turn us into beasts.
That doesn’t mean his songs are rants about the primal urges within us. The opposite is mostly the case. Songs such as the instrumental “Shake Your Ass at God” and McMurtry’s ode to desire “Heaven Can’t Be Better”, sexplicitly proclaim carnality as holy. The instrumental horns do the talking on one track while the singer calmly vocalizes his yearnings on the next. Both songs share a cool composure with each other and the rest of the record. He may be libidinous, but the excitement is formalized into art.
That’s evidenced in several ways, such as the fact that Curtis McMurtry’s primary accompanist on this album plays the cello—not the instrument of choice used by popular artists to express one’s dirty thoughts. Diana Burgess (of the Austin band Mother Falcon) creatively employs her stringed instrument in various ways to bring out McMurtry’s most idiosyncratic elements—a symphonic reverie one moment, a country and Western swing vibe the next.
Burgess also duets and harmonizes vocally with McMurtry. On tunes such as “You-Nirverse” and “Devour the Divine”, the two play off each other to combat the silence. The vocals adorn the instrumentation rather than the other way around. (Note: McMurtry plays lead acoustic guitar on both these cuts.)
McMurtry wrote all of the songs on The Pollen & The Rot. Besides Burgess, McMurtry is joined by Taylor Turner on bass, Paul Pinon on drums and percussion, and Jules Belmont on pedal steel on most tracks. This basic lineup gives the record a unified and intimate feel. The singer is not singing autobiographically. This is clearly intended as an artwork, not a memoir. The assumption is that the listener can identify oneself with the protagonist and identify the malevolent aspect of one’s own behavior. McMurtry’s point is that these unpleasant aspects of selfhood are only natural. No one is to blame.
“Can’t you hear the call building up, erupting,” McMurtry asks about the urge to procreate that exists along with the desire to destroy. He celebrates our human nature as part of the larger scheme of things. It doesn’t really matter if he composes three more albums to complete the song cycle, as each of the seasons contains the whole in some form—whether it’s found in the seed, the emerging plant, the flower, or the fruit. Or in death, which in itself can be found in the origins of life.
The Pollen & The Rot ends with Curtis McMurtry and Burgess singing and picking in unison. “Spinning like a swarm of flies / Desperate to prove we’re still alive / Here we are in the dirt / What will we grow?” they ask in ragged voices. The moral of the story is we live, we do what we can to survive and satisfy our needs, then we die. There is no judgment.