Boot Hill Hymnal

orn of the voices of past lives and baptized in the dust bowl dirt, the dark roots music of the HEATHEN APOSTLES harkens back to a by gone chapter of American history while firmly keeping one foot planted in the present-day city of Los Angeles. One Indian summer evening, femme fatale bellower Mather Louth (Radio Noir) and punk rock veteran Chopper Franklin (The Cramps, Charley Horse), quickly uncovered a mutual appreciation for murder balladry, Americana, and memento mori. Soon, the HEATHEN APOSTLES surfaced. The landscape was further tilled with the addition of Thomas Lorioux (The Kings of Nuthin’) on the upright bass. The Heathen's debut release, Boot Hill Hymnal, seeks to answer a question posed long ago by Blind Willie Johnson- just what is the soul of a man' (...

Or, as the case may be here, a woman with a thousand-yard stare.) The resulting collection of songs is complex, catchy, and wholly cohesive to the Apostles' ghost town.

Red Brick Dust, the album's powerful opener, paints a supernatural plea for protection against the most primal of evils. In The Reckoning, Louth tells the terrifying tale of a lone miscreant hell-bent on destruction, building from a restrained whisper to an unholy crescendo of chaos, punctuated by primal screams. However, the Apostles are hardly a one-note wonder with regards to nefarious subject matter, as witnessed by the rousing foot-stomper Forget-Me-Not. The band also ensures to leave listeners desiring a second book of Heathen hymnals with the forlorn lullaby closer Lonesome Whistle, its final chords drifting off like a lone tumbleweed into the fading sunset. Boot Hill Hymnal captures the essence of the HEATHEN APOSTLES modus operandi: Southern gothic imagery surrounded by haunting, minor-chord banjo, mandolin and violin melodies, helmed by the voice of an evocative Indigo child, unstuck in time.