First Listen: Adia Victoria, 'Beyond the Bloodhounds'
by Luke Taylor
May 09, 2016
The streaming period for this album has expired; scroll down to listen to the embedded Spotify playlist.
In Harper Lee's To Kill A Mockingbird, Scout and Dill discuss the legend of "hot steams," a ghostly presence that supposedly lurks on lonely roads, sucking the breath of passersby and dooming them to a similar postmortem fate unless the living person utters an incantation.
Referencing Lee's Southern Gothic novel seems a good starting point for a discussion about Adia Victoria's debut album, Beyond the Bloodhounds. Victoria taps into a variety of influences, including rock, blues, punk and country, to give us an album best described as Southern Gothic. Beyond the Bloodhounds even opens with a 47-second track, "Lonely Avenue," giving us an eerie a cappella welcome to this spectral sonic space. (And lest we forget, the lyrics "Lonely Avenue" reappear in the coda of the album's tenth track, the creepily titled, "Invisible Hands.")
The album's second track, "Dead Eyes," continues the ghostly imagery, but the ghosts Victoria is really conjuring on Beyond the Bloodhounds are the memories of her 20s. "Those are tender years," Victoria says. "It hurts. You get busted up in love and life. You make a lot of mistakes. You meet a lot of people who do you dirty because you don't understand your value yet."
Our memories can haunt us, and Victoria taps deeply into her own experiences and emotions for this collection of songs; each track bursts forth in feelings-laden lyrics. On the album's third track, "Out of Love," Victoria concludes by singing, "I am so out of love with everyone." The subsequent track, "Mortimer's Blues," evokes a Blondie vibe as she sings of being lonely and missing a past love: "What will I do without you / When my heart won't beat anymore?"
Looking beyond her own sphere, Adia Victoria taps into a larger collective experience; on "Stuck in the South," Victoria sings "I don't know nothin' about Southern belles / But I can tell you something about Southern hell." And the album's very title is a reference to the epitome of Southern hell: it's taken from a passage in Harriet Jacobs' first-person account, Narrative in the Life of a Slave Girl, published in 1861.
But the laments of Beyond the Bloodhounds are not delivered in a spirit of resignation; Adia Victoria is sharing her story from a place of power. Rather than letting these hot steams suck our breath, Victoria provides the perfect incantations to keep them at bay. "Look out - keep your eyes on the prize, girl," she sings, for example, on "And Then You Die." Throughout the record, Victoria's vocals are filled with conviction and empowerment, and they're punctuated by the album's layered arrangements, which include fuzzed-out guitars, assertive bass lines and big drums. Just listen to the track, "Head Rot," as Victoria sings, "Don't you tell me that my baby's gone," this is not someone who is a pushover; in fact, she's quite the opposite: her lyrical delivery coupled with the badass backbeat conspire to say, "Just try messing with me — I dare ya."
In Beyond the Bloodhounds, Adia Victoria delivers an eerie and atmospheric album that wanders through the ghosts of the past — ghosts we can recognize and may even frighten us on recollection. But as Adia Victoria leads us on this excursion, it's cathartic and enjoyable — because we know Victoria is totally in control.
Adia Victoria's Beyond the Bloodhounds releases May 13 on Canvasback Music.
