About Me
What do you get if you take 1960s Stax-Records-style gospel and Southern soul and cross it with the darkly literate lyrical sensibility of Leonard Cohen? Well, yes... Nick Cave. But alright, what if you then add a bit of Hank Williams, some film noir and an occasional touch of cabaret? Okay, yeah... Tom Waits, fair enough. But okay... What if Tom Waits could actually sing? And didn't look like a monkey?
Turn Back, O Man is a group of sexy, dangerous, incredibly intriguing men who play music together as a means of appeasing the unrelenting demands of their own terrible gods - gods who apparently don't listen to anything recorded after 1968. Turn Back, O Man puts the "goth" in gothpel music.
Turn Back, O Man is a group of shameless namedroppers who have, in various prior bands, shared stages with M. Ward, Giant Sand, the New Pornographers, Calexico, Magnolia Electric Company, American Music Club, Neko Case, Califone, Devotchka, Jason Lytle (Grandaddy), Smog, Pernice Brothers, My Morning Jacket, and other artists too impressive to even mention.
The members of Turn Back, O Man want very desperately for you to like them... That is to say, of course, they "want very desperately" in that professional sort of way. Certainly not in that needy, seeking validation sort of way. Certainly.
Turn Back, O Man enjoys quiet candlelit dinners, harmful gossip and competitive smoking. Turn Back, O Man's turn-offs include constructive criticism and women who do not believe in its members' sexy and dangerous personae.
Turn Back, O Man is absolutely, definitely not playing music as a means of garnering the attention - and, hopefully, praise - that its members were denied as children. Neither is Turn Back, O Man enacting some sort of elaborate and bizarrely displaced revenge against its members' former schoolmates who ridiculed them... the bastards. Rather, Turn Back, O Man is a group of very well-adjusted adults who come together simply for the pure, soul-nourishing joy of playing songs about sexual perversity and murder.
