This one's scary. It's dark. It puts the listener in a state of unease. It's uncomfortable listening. You don't so much "like" a recording like this but instead respect it. I had to turn off the opening title track and recompose myself because it got inside my head. Once I knew what I was in for, I kept at it and, eventually, the alt-charm and twisted beauty of the Aaron Irwin Quartet's A Room Forever came to the fore. But it didn't come easy, then again, the best things in life are never easy.
Maybe the fact that there are no drums adds to the mysterious horror movie soundtrack quality. Irwin, known for his alto saxophone in New York City jazz circles for over a decade, doesn't even play sax here: he's on clarinet. Add Matthew McDonald's trombone, Pete McCann's guitar and Thomson Kneeland's bass and you've got an odd clarinet/trombone/bass/guitar format that wrings every last bit of suspense out of each track.
These 12 Irwin originals are based on West Virginian writer Breece D'J Pancake's only book (The Stories of Breece D'J Pancake). This slim 1983 volume was published posthumously as Pancake shot himself dead in 1979 at the age of 26. His stories are of West Virginia coal miners, truckers, welfare recipients, tugboat workers, drinkers, cockfight organizers, wife beaters, boxers and, in one particularly gruesome story, a depressed piece of white trash bound to a wheelchair. Each track on A Room Forever is linked to a Pancake story. Musically, there are elements of Appalachian front-porch folk, avant-garde jazz and pastoral classical.
Take "The Scrapper," for example. In the song, instruments clash in a jarring sequence of events. In the story, former boxing pro Skeevy gets in the ring with a man intent on murdering him. Despite his jaw shattering, he attempts to gouge out his opponent's eyeball and step on it but only succeeds in biting off his own tongue. This is the stuff from which the Aaron Irwin Quartet made A Room Forever. Caveat emptor.
