Artist: Scott H. Biram
Album: Sold Out to the Devil: A Collection of Gospel Cuts
Label: Bloodshot Records
Release Date: 11.22.19
Unofficially ordained as “The Dirty Ol’ One Man Band,” the Rev. Scott H. Biram’s skid-row ministry of raw, acoustic country blues and ragged Americana is often moved by the Holy Spirit. In celebration of Bloodshot Records’ 25th anniversary, the label went on a mission to unearth Biram’s most feverish fire-and-brimstone sermons and deepest spiritual contemplations for an old hymnal called Sold Out to the Devil: A Collection of Gospel Cuts.
Delivered with head bowed and earthy vocal modulations, a prayerful reading of “Amazing Grace” closes this service with soft serenity, sitting beside a babbling brook. Somehow both reverential and sardonic, a frenzied, scratchy remake of Son House’s “Get Me Religion (Preaching the Blues)” and the furiously strummed “I See the Light/What’s His Name” lift the snake handlers out of their seats in a compilation that truly believes in the awesome power and glory of Gospel music, as wheezing harmonica and seething, wild-eyed vocals ravage “God Don’t Work (Like A Natural Man),” enthusiastically exhumed from Biram’s self-released album Preachin’ & Hollerin’. The swaying, agonized moaning of “True Religion,” which first appeared on 2017’s The Bad Testament, is haunted by the ghosts of American-African spirituals, while Biram’s sunny, upbeat and previously unreleased cover of the Louvin Brothers’ proselytizing “Broadminded” gets born again, just like his swinging, sepia-toned version of the traditional favorite “John the Revelator.”
As the war for Biram’s soul rages on, with past albums torn between sin and salvation, this set is baptized in gritty realism, spare instrumentation and bleak percussion, all elements of Biram’s uniquely addictive and persuasive—if also beaten and battered—sound. Repent, for his twisted perspective on faith and fundamentalism never fails to provoke.
—Peter Lindblad
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