Metro Pulse/Music/BAND

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What:
Trailer Bride with Nug Jug

When:
Friday, Aug. 3 at 10 p.m.

Where:
Patrick Sullivan's

Trailer Bride's backwoods country rock is dark and disturbing—but you can't pull your ears away.

by Matthew T. Everett

There's something painfully sad in the music of Trailer Bride, the kind of wild-eyed and desperate forsakenness that you can find in backwoods churches and swampy juke joints and along dark two-lane highways. It's in the paranoid Deep South-noir of "Under Your Spell" and the hurtling abandon of "Jesco," both from the band's latest record, High Seas. It's in the haunting, reverb-drenched washes of guitar that hover over the songs, and in the loose-limbed rhythm section underneath that propels it all forward. The people in these songs sound utterly lost as they shuffle through the torchy country jazz arrangements.

But it all adds up to a disturbingly beautiful whole, dark and deep, unsettling but undeniably sexy. The key to the sound is Melissa Swingle's voice. It's detached and full of desire at the same time, icy cold and vulnerable, delivered in a flat, almost emotionless tone that's weighted full of unspoken meaning.

Melissa Swingle swears the band doesn't set out to be so weird.

"I know people say that we're weird and creepy, but we don't sit down and say, 'Let's do something weird and creepy,'" says the singer, guitarist, banjo player and songwriter. "I guess I'm just weird and creepy. We're weird and creepy. We try not to be that way. We try to be normal. I just write from my own experience, and I've been through some pretty dark stuff, just like everybody has. I'm kind of melancholic sometimes, and I write from my personality."

The current Trailer Bride lineup—Swingle, drummer Brad Goolsby, bassist Daryl White, and guitarist Scott Goolsby—has been together for four years, but Swingle and Brad have been playing together since 1994. On the album cover for High Seas, with Swingle dressed in a sultry red dress, Scott Goolsby sporting a brand new shiner from a fight the night before, and White made up like a biker, the band's appearance seems to match the hardness of the music inside.

"We were definitely posing for that one," Swingle says. "Daryl used to be a bouncer, so he can be tough if he needs to be. But he's not really a tough guy at all. And Scott had been in a fight the night before, the poor thing. But we had to get the pictures made that night. We were under a deadline."

Swingle and Brad and Scott Goolsby are originally from Mississippi—which could explain some of the Southern Gothic overtones of their music—though they now consider Chapel Hill their home. But Swingle would like to see more of the world by touring more often; Trailer Bride only goes on tour a couple of times a year.

"Personally, I like being on the road, but it's hard because of family stuff," she says. "Other bands do it all year. It's just what they do. Under different circumstances, that's what we'd do. I like traveling."

Swingle didn't start playing guitar until she was 27. She says she's always been a late bloomer. "I have the feeling that if I'd started playing guitar when I was 16 or 17 I would have wasted a lot of good tunes on silly things, songs about how my bangs aren't high enough or my boyfriend's kissing other girls," she says.

The maturity of Swingle's playing and songwriting allows her to tackle a subject like the infamous mountain flat-foot dancer Jesco White with delicate and tender respect, rather than condescending delight. White, the subject of the 1991 documentary Dancing Outlaw, appeared at a Trailer Bride show in West Virginia last year, and danced on stage with the band. None of the members knew about the movie, but Swingle says they were all impressed with White and had to write "Jesco," the opening track on High Seas.

"Everybody kept saying, 'Jesco's here. He's here. He's got his whole family here,' but we didn't know who he was," Swingle says. "Then he came up and shook my hand and asked if we'd mind if he danced. It was a moment I'll never forget. Jesco was dancing on the stage, and his whole family was up there with him. I think it was just meant to happen; we had to write a song about it. Jesco's got something, a look in his eye when he's dancing. It's frightening and enthralling at the same time. The whole crowd could feel it. There was some kind of magic going on."

There's magic in Trailer Bride, too, and it's both frightening and enthralling.