Don’t be fooled by the breezy, lovably silly first track on Alberta band The Culls’ debut album, If Your Horse Returns Alone. While “Mathematician Blues” tallies up a list of professionals that a wronged lover would like to enlist to spread the bad news on their no-longer-significant other, the album soon plunges into an odd sort of darkness, albeit a darkness dressed in humorous rags.
Taking a break from watching Peter Pan with his toddler daughter, Culls singer-songwriter Rick Overwater explains that the juxtaposition of darkness and humour is natural to someone raised in the country. While he terminated a viewing of Dumbo at one of the more cruel scenes a few nights earlier, Overwater has no worries his daughter will grow up sheltered from reality.
“We do live out here in the country; I’ll be shooting gophers by spring. And she’s already seen me taking dead mice out of the traps,” he says from the three acre spread between Olds and Didsbury his family moved to in August. “That’s why I wanted to get out of the city. I want my kid to think it’s OK to shoot and eat your own animals. I was four or five when one of our cattle aborted, and I didn’t know what I was looking at but I knew it was a pretty heavy thing.”
It was a few weeks after the cattle incident that young Rick was in his daddy’s pickup outside of a Texaco station when he heard Johnny Cash sing “I shot a man in Reno just to watch him die.” He knew he had found another heavy thing in life, a kind of music that reflected the dark side of rural life.
“That’s what’s lacking in country these days, is the frickin’ country, if you ask me,” Overwater says. “I try to make the country references really legitimate. I try to make sure I’ve seen them and lived them because I find most county songs these days, when it does have some rural reference, it’s some city kid that plays good lap steel who is pulling it from another country song because no one lives that life anymore.”
A third-generation member of an Alberta homesteading family, Overwater recalls growing up in a farmhouse where the water was hauled in a bucket. He left the prairie to move to the shining city, eagerly attracted by university, girls, bars and the chance to start a heavy metal band. As a rural kid in an urban landscape, he says he was made to feel like a hick for years until he realized it was a reference he could capitalize on in his music. He co-founded the popular Agriculture Club and spun copious odometer miles during years of touring. Ag Club’s eventual demise led Overwater to round up guitarist and mandolin player Todd Maduke, bassist Michael Platt and drummer Mike Semenchuck and form The Culls.
While Ag Club mixed country with a metal feel, The Culls sound is tempered with more of a country-bluegrass feel than a metal one (though Overwater does describe bluegrass as “the speed metal of country”). It’s a more rural sound for a man who’s returned to his rural life.
“People in the country don’t have the need for irony,” Overwater explains. “They confront death and butcher their own cattle all the time, but at the same time, their outlook is not as bleak. Bluegrass has so many great happy songs with totally vile lyrics — they are happy, clap-your-hands songs, but then the lyrics are death and dismemberment and tragedy and heartbreak and then more death. It’s not ‘your dad hangs out with junkies,’ it’s ‘your dad would never spend 80 bucks to put a pet down.’ You do it yourself.”
