Gothic tales of love and loss help exorcise inner demons.
Ten years on from his previous release, Delgado’s ‘Tin Corazón’ offers up what he terms “prime cuts of dark desert swoon”. Combining with new band Los Conejos de Amor (The Rabbits of Love), the album arrives following a fragmented recording process with Delgado and producer Jason Davis working remotely through the pandemic and spread across four states. Sending demos of himself on guitar and forced to take a less forceful role than customary, Delgado gave Davis the freedom to create the distinctive instrumentation that permeates the album.
Opening up with surf guitar accompanied by a solemn bass drum, like a church bell tolling for the dead, ‘Teeth’ hits you right in the teeth. There’s an eerie vocal reminiscent of Roxy Music’s ‘In Every Dream Home A Heartache’, Delgado’s vibrato recalling Bryan Ferry’s psychotic loner. Straight from the Ennio Morricone playbook, it’s hard not to picture Clint Eastwood and a hopeful undertaker about to pick up some new business.
Like the Man With No Name in those Sergio Leone movies, Delgado himself is familiar with an itinerant lifestyle. Leaving their alcoholic father, his mother took her two children and travelled far and wide through the US, so that between the ages of 3 and 17 Delgado had moved thirteen times. He tried living in Chicago, forging a musical career in punk and shoegaze bands, then spent another ten years in Detroit. Things continued to go downhill and so he headed west to California, but the title of the next track indicates this was also not an unqualified success. ‘Califukinfornia’ is about “reaching the end of your tether and wanting to give everyone and everything the middle finger”.
The mariachi bands heard during his early days in New Mexico play their part in the ¾ time ‘Red Earth Bed’ though this is no happy wedding song but a grim tale of retribution. Fabulous instrumentation and a mere seven lines of searing, soaring vocal make this a standout track. If Delgado is working out his inner demons, there’s relief in ‘Night Owl’ which has a swaying rhythm and a gentle guitar arpeggio to create a more optimistic tale of new love.
Title-track ‘Tin Corazon’ is a tribute to Delgado’s mother, at one time a New Mexico Revival-style tinsmith. It’s a life-story in a few lines, her ’75 Civic taking the children through the Badlands and the heartland to the Oregon trail. Like a Steinbeck novel, Delgado captures the essence of a family on the move. This morphs into social issues with the insistent ‘Canyons’ pitching the caged children of border migrants alongside the death of George Floyd as symptomatic of a lynch-mob culture.
Family matters occupy the next two tracks. The love song ‘Always With Me’ seems pessimistic with its implied threat to anyone who may interfere with his new lady but Delgado’s proficient yodelling brings warmth to the song’s middle and end. ‘Somedays’ is for the son of a former partner and shows the singer in paternal mood, no doubt remembering the absence of a relationship with his own father.
With so much angst poured out, ‘Pulling Steam’ is a three-minute requiem march taking us back to where we came in. In a nightmarish vision, Delgado sees his mortal remains lying dead in the street, fed upon by blackbirds as the pulsating drum beat returns. The song flowed out of him in 20-30 minutes at a time when things had reached a low-point and as he says, “from that moment forward, I just kept on writing to exorcise the demons”.
In ‘Tin Corazón’ Delgado has certainly done that. With the songs all written on his acoustic guitar, artist and producer have combined to turn sketches into Gothic landscapes. Atmospheric instrumentation and a range of rhythms create moods that both disturb and excite. Like a tale by Edgar Allan Poe, it’s a dark and ominous album but you can’t put it down.
