God Bless the Weeds in the Wheat

I was born into a family of Jesus Movement Pentecostals.  We spoke in tongues, believed the whole Bible to be true and literal, and figured every other denomination (read: cult) was going to hell.  My mom was a secretary.  My dad was a used car salesman.

I grew up believing a lot of things that sound completely off the wall in my favorite pub.  That is of course unless I found myself sitting in said pub next to David Bazan.  Turns out David had basically the same background as me – same denomination with the same claims to truth and the same attitude towards people of different spiritual leanings.  Turns out Dave’s been asking some of the same questions I and a lot of my friends have been asking for a while now.  Turns out he’s written some songs along these lines.  Turns out…they make a pretty damn good album.

Curse Your Branches starts where the Good Book starts: creation and the fall of man.  “Fresh from the soil, we were beautiful and true.  In control of our emotions ‘til we ate the poison fruit, and now it’s hard to be a decent human being.”  He then goes on to question the premise that, “all this misbehaving grew from one enchanted tree.”

For a church kid like me, these are strong words.  I mean, God made man.  Man ate apple.  Man survived by wife and kids after being beheaded by a produce truck on the way home from the office.  That’s how it works.  We disobeyed, and now we get the flu and cheat on our wives.  It was our fault for eating that goddamn apple.

Well if this bit of the book is true, David sees the blame squarely on the shoulders of a creator who set his creation up for failure.  “You knew what would happen, and made us just the same.  Then you, my Lord, can take the blame.”  He asks questions and makes accusations of which the mere thought would have been considered blasphemy in my childhood.  The listener is unrelentingly confronted with the agnostic/universalist/borderline atheist debate that’s obviously been raging in Dave for the last several years.

The listener is also treated to the openness we’ve known and loved for so long when he says things like, “the crew has killed the captain, but they still can here his voice,” speaking of the part of him that still sees God in nature and hears Him in the wind. Or in an alternate verse to the title track “Curse Your Branches” when he says, “…even as the threat of hell is disappearing, the threat of losing you is blowing up.”  I’m not quite sure if that last line is directed at God or his wife.  The former would make sense from the perspective of someone who’s questioning the basis of their lifelong spirituality.  And the latter makes sense in the light of his wife’s struggles with Bazan’s new outlook and lyrical content, and his determination to drag others to hell with him by spreading the anti-Gospel in his new material.

He continues the album with a brilliant reference to kid-touching priests and a thought that maybe it wasn’t God’s “heavy breath” that blew up our lungs in the first place.  But have no fear.  There are a few songs here that don’t make the God-fearing hairs stand up on the back of your neck.  He’s got a sweet little song in the same vein as “Progress” from his Control album that references his drinking and culminates with his daughter in jail for killing a mother of three in a drunk-driving accident.  He also covers a Bob Dylan tune as a bonus track, and if you get to see him live you may here a very Bazany version Cohen’s “Hallelujah.”

So this thing gets 2 thumbs way up from a devout church kid who grew into a 30something with questions.  I’m not saying I agree with all of it, but I didn’t agree with everything Rage Against the Machine said either, and I still bought their shit.

Oh yeah…and as hard as it is for me to set aside the lyrical content here, I’d like to at least mention the music itself.  It’s great.  He’s in fine form.  Maybe there’s no need to reconsider your reasons for going solo, Dave.

by Jacob Taylor

Jacob Taylor likes beer and pizza.  He can be reached at jacob@circlesixmagazine.com.