Crooked Fingers: Swet Deth (Vinyl LP)

One afternoon, Eric Bachmann’s son returned home from school with a sheath of pictures he’d drawn, all of them macabre. “There were crows and sinister figures with scythes and tombstones,” he recalls, “and in the center, there was a strange, lush green tree growing out of all of this red and black. On one of them, he had written ‘DETH, SWET DETH,’ and everything clicked in my head.”

Swet Deth, Bachmann’s first album under his Crooked Fingers moniker after a 15-year hiatus, organised itself around the image: its songs are about death, yes, but there’s a sweetness to them, a wry sensibility to his lyrics that comes from having experienced many kinds of death and the life that follows in its wake.

Black vinyl version.

1. Cold Waves (w/ Mac McCaughan)
2. From All Ways (w/ Matt Berninger)
3. Spray Tan Speed Queen (In A German Car)
4. Insomnia
5. Empty Love and Cheap Thrills
6. Haunted (w/ Sharon Van Etten)
7. Hospital
8. (I'm Your) Bodhisattva
9. Lena
10. Steady Now