Brother Dege - How to Kill a Horse

After two successful albums Brother Dege (AKA Dege Legg) is one of the best kept secrets in Louisiana; a musician, writer, and heir to a long line of eccentric characters born and raised in the Deep South. Hailing from the Cajun swamplands and raging like the mad lovechild of Son House and Faulkner, Legg has burned a crooked trail to the Promised Land. Avoiding traditional career paths, he's spent decades exploring the backwoods weirdness of the southern U.S, working odd jobs and forging his own brand of southern/psyouthern music. Since the mid 90s, Dege has pushed slide guitar, resonators, and roots music, kicking and screaming into the 21st century, recording self-released albums in trailer parks, sheds, and other low rent environments that meld trancefolk, Delta blues, punk, rock, metal, hippie ragas, and avant-outlaw country into one blasted whole. In 2010, Brother Dege reinvented the Delta blues for future generations on Folk Songs of the American Longhair (2010) with 10 blazing tracks that howled like the field recordings of Alan Lomax and tunneled into the ancient mysteries of pre-war blues. In 2012, Quentin Tarantino tapped Brother Dege's "Too Old to Die Young" for the movie & soundtrack to Django Unchained, stating that "everyone song on American Longhair could've been in the movie...it's like a greatest hits album." With his latest album, Brother Dege returns to "reinvent the steel" with the slide-Dobro riff-o-rama of How to Kill a Horse. Recorded at night in an empty warehouse (while Legg worked at a men's homeless shelter during the day), the album is a tour de force artwork that ranges from barn burners to ancient Delta meditations to Babylonian junkyard jams that explore the dark underbelly of what it is to be a man in the modern world. Influences include: Ernest Hemingway, Joseph Conrad, Ry Cooder, Norman Mailer, Henry Miller, Sonic Youth, Black Sabbath, Blind Willie Johnson, Einstürzende Neubauten, Jackson Pollock and Don Quixote. Like Hemingway at his finest, How to Kill a Horse goes deep into the prison rodeo of man's heart, confronting the darker, flawed side of the self while going full-aggro in the existential blast furnace of the modern world, wrestling with men's roles as providers, protectors, partners, lovers, warriors, peacekeepers, whatever. Full of cinematic slabs of biblical noir, dusty heat, haunted redemption, and bell towers of emotion, Brother Dege's How to Kill a Horse is a massive shot across the bow to riff heads, songwriters, and Americana enthusiasts around the world. Anyone expecting an album of retro-roots singer/songwriter schmaltz has got another thing coming. Horse is a game changer that launches the whole mess of roots music out of the vinyl dustbins and into the 21st century. Recorded with cheap Dobros, junked acoustic guitars, and ragged percussion instruments on a zero dollar budget, the album teems with world-class songwriting, Ouija board melodies, double helix slides, swampland soliloquies, Hendrix-like reverse resonators, and a gang of twang - all howling into the colossal echo chamber of the reality.