Bruce Piephoff is a full-time singer/songwriter/poet based in Greensboro, NC who has has recorded eight albums. The current CD, Slaughterhouse, has 20 tracks, and each track has...well, a lot of words. Not just a lot of words but a lot of detail. By the 14th or 15th track, so much has gone into your ears that your head is in danger of exploding!
"Life's all in the journey..." Piephoff's journeys on the rails of his North Carolina twang are in a down home acoustic folk style. The album begins in the backwoods...to which it repeatedly returns...with a country rock song in honor of Hurricane Floyd called "The Flood."
Ain't nothin' left but carcasses and mud and decay.
Ain't no flood insurance is gonna help us now.
Chickens are dead and so are the cows.
He could, though, be an urban busker describing the "Streets Of Queens"; his uncle lives there "with the joker man and the king." As on these tracks, many of his lyrics are richly descriptive of environment; others, like those in "Pyramid's Place," are more introspectively descriptive. The title track "Slaughterhouse" is a description of the racial/ethnic processes at a slaughterhouse; perhaps it is a metaphor for a larger world. The sad "Fransie Visits Pinocchio" is about a boy with an aging disorder, to the tune of John Prine's "Sabu The Elephant Boy." "He was a poet, the sculptor of words on the page," reports "Jim's Tune," a memorial for a friend. "He was the one, the one captivated by the slow secrets." But the many secrets and the many jumps on Slaughterhouse, often left me lost; a lyric sheet would help!
Piephoff plays guitar, which makes up the bulk of accompaniment, and harmonica. Seven other musicians add their instruments; it's good to hear David DiGiuseppe again on accordion and it would have been great to hear more. Another nice touch is David Manring's dobro/National. You can tell this skillful band and singer were having a good time recording. The various musical styles and the changes in instruments keep the album moving. However, Piephoff could have edited some of the tracks and have made a less cluttered, more concise album, though perhaps that wasn't his goal. The most aesthetically effective track on the album is also the most simple, a recitation of a voyage on Icelandair to Amsterdam called "Vincent."
