Nat Myers – Yellow Peril (2023) [FLAC 24bit/96kHz]

Nat Myers - Yellow Peril (2023) [FLAC 24bit/96kHz] Download

“I’m always searching,” says the Korean-American blues poet Nat Myers. “Itinerancy is something that I’ve owned. I’ve done a lot of traveling, but lately it’s started to seep into my songwriting and my music. Life just feels simpler on the road. You’re just trying to get to the next place in one piece.” His debut album, Yellow Peril, is full of jumpy blues songs about hopping trains, burning up highways, running from some danger but also running toward something harder to define and even harder to catch. Full of intelligence and soul, contradiction and nuance, these songs reflect his restlessness and wanderlust in their fleet riffs, complex rhythms, and quick tempos, as he draws from a variety of stylistic strains and historical threads to weave a complex epic about life in post-pandemic America.

Myers’ story starts in Kansas, but quickly moves to West Tennessee and then Northern Kentucky. Even as a child, he was a restless spirit: “I had a rowdy little childhood. My parents signed me up against my will to play in the school band, but I hated it. I pulled a Who on my trumpet and just destroyed it.” Instead, he spent his days skateboarding and listening to pop-punk and hardcore. “My mom got me a left-handed starter guitar, just trying to keep me away from the riffraff I was hanging out with. I kept hanging out with them, but now I had a guitar.” Even as he developed a deft picking style, Myers didn’t harbor great ambitions to be a musician. His true passion was poetry, especially the classics all high schoolers read but most quickly forget: Shakespeare and Homer, but especially The Odyssey, that epic of endless wandering. “I love the exercise of putting pen to paper. It’s the same way I feel about putting a needle down on vinyl. Magical things can happen.””When I bring it up with an Asian person, they immediately know what I’m talking about,” says Nat Myers of Yellow Peril, the name of his debut album. “But 99 percent of this country doesn’t know what it is. It’s a very evocative term, and I liked the idea of putting that concept into a blues song.” The scare-mongering term dates back to the 19th century and a “fear” that Asian culture and people would somehow corrupt Western values. Written during what will be remembered as a dark time in history, Yellow Peril stares straight into the injustice—including the AAPI hate embedded in the global Covid-19 pandemic. “Wanna go to college but they saying/ ‘You just a little too smart, Charley,'” Myers sings on the title track, echoing admissions controversies sweeping American schools. Led by Myers on dobro, the song is filled out with guitar and mandolin from Pat McLaughlin, Leroy Troy on banjo, and drums and upright bass by producer Dan Auerbach, and there’s a feeling of urgency to the jugband-blues hoots and hollers. “Everywhere I been somebody bein’ abused/ Never gonna win, some of us are born to lose/ Just wanna have a little fun before we die,” Myers cries before the music drops out and he proclaims, “There never ever was no difference ‘tween you and I.” Raised in Kansas, Kentucky, and Tennessee, and a longtime fan of hardcore, hip-hop, poetry, and the blues, the Korean American Myers busts the stereotypes of all those identity signifiers. His scene-setting lyrics paint a picture of another time—but also a way of life that still exists on the fringes—on train-hopping tales like “Trixin'” and “75-71.” “Well I know an engineer, the L and N/ Go with him to another land/ Knows somewhere we can eat and sleep/ Down south Memphis, Tennessee,” he sings on the latter, before continuing: “Let that train satisfy my mind.” The song features his fleet dobro work, sounding like it’s itching to get somewhere new, and the toe-tapping that pervades the record. (Myers recorded at Auerbach’s Nashville abode, lending a homey touch and hardwood floor.) His voice turns scratchy on “Ramble No More” as he pleads to be let into a lover’s home and heart, and he breathes through squinting high notes (“Bound to loooose”) on “Roscoe,” with its twisted little riff à la R.L. Burnside. Love goes from lusty (“I’ll cut your wood … gonna make you feel so good,” Myers flirts on “Heart Like a Scroll”) to sour: “Undertaker Blues”—its dobro keening and background stomp like a military march—pouts, “Baby, what’s wrong with you/ You don’t suit me like you used to do … I’m gonna call the undertaker.” But things end on a jaunty note with “Pray for Rain.” It’s a romantic, pitching woo song: “I’ll put you in mother’s locket/ Drag you ’round in my back pocket … I’m gonna build you a garden/ Somewhere to put your heart in/ Then all we gotta do is pray for rain.” Consider it aural optimism. “I didn’t really have a consciousness about who I was as a Korean American until very recently. I got very militant about it during the pandemic, and while I’ve chilled out a little since then, I’m all about Yellow Power,” Myers has said. “I want this record to raise my folks up.” – Shelly Ridenour

Tracklist:

1-1. Nat Myers – 75-71 (03:44)
1-2. Nat Myers – Trixin’ (02:25)
1-3. Nat Myers – Yellow Peril (03:24)
1-4. Nat Myers – Ramble No More (02:55)
1-5. Nat Myers – Duck N’ Dodge (03:36)
1-6. Nat Myers – Roscoe (03:34)
1-7. Nat Myers – Misbehavin’ Mama (02:33)
1-8. Nat Myers – Heart Like A Scroll (02:48)
1-9. Nat Myers – Undertaker Blues (03:41)
1-10. Nat Myers – Pray For Rain (03:13)

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