Artist:     Rod Melancon

Album:     Pinkville

Label:     Blue Elan

Release Date:     4.5.2019

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Rod Melancon’s first album, the striking Southern Gothic, was presumably so named because of its largely dark content. Turns out, it’s Melancon himself who’s the Southern Goth, because his second album, Pinkville, isn’t about little girls in tutus, despite the pastel title.

Melancon writes from Evil’s point of view, sometimes of characters who are deliciously proud of their malevolent ways, sometimes from characters who simply seem not to distinguish between right and wrong, as if they were colorblind.

Among the ranks of proud evil-doers, in “Lord Knows” a man tracks down the sheriff who killed his brother and tells him “’You shot my brother, back in ’42.’ With a smile on his face [the sheriff] said, ‘Well, I should have aimed at you,’” and they proceed to kill one another. “Rehabilitation” paints a vivid portrait of addiction, with junkies talking in a circle while “Billy’s in a corner, foaming at the mouth.”

From the don’t-know-any-better half of his grim crowd, Melancon (who himself had a stint as an actor) covers Tom Waits’ “Goin’ Out West [where they appreciate me],” an intentionally monotonous and poorly-worded tale from a Neanderthal-type parolee who heads for Hollywood assuming instant fame and fortune, rasping the chorus: “I don’t need no makeup, I got real scars, I got hair on my chest, I look good without a shirt.” Spoiler alert: Does he ever learn? No, of course not.

Two back-to-back songs pay tribute to past music heroes. “The Heartbreakers” (premiered in Elmore) chronicles Tom Petty’s rise, and “Corpus Christi Carwash,” a slow 3/4-time ballad, paraphrases one of Freddy Fender’s famous lines in the tender story of his “wasting my days and nights in a Corpus Christi carwash.”

Melancon deals with tough subjects and situations most of us (happily) will never experience, but it’s never depressing no matter what dark hole he peers into, and his occasional forays into humor provide comic relief for his well-crafted Gothic stories.

—Suzanne Cadgène