World Without End by Bob Frank and John Murry

World without End is a history lesson of violent America.

Fittingly released on the Day of the Dead, when the veil between the living and the dead is thinnest, and when the dead can communicate most easily, these ghosts tell their deadmen's tales. And ghost stories always have a moral. On the ten song record, some are easier to spot than others. Such as the revenge dictum --if you hurt my family I will hunt you down and not only kill you but desecrate your body. There's the Southern gothic prognostic: if you screw my husband, I'll wall you up in the chimney with a jeweled dagger in your chest. In one song, a brother kills a sweet-talking guru for seducing his sister.

American lore idolizes criminals and vigilantes, and World Without End is filled with anti-hero anthems. We cheer for the unrepentant outlaw who kills himself so the sheriff can't brag that he killed him. We admire the heinous criminal who says, "Drop the trap door I got nothing to say." We all want to live like that, without explanations, and let our actions, right or wrong, speak for themselves. In the lightest song, Bubba Rose, a dock worker, wakes up one morning and goes to work and shoots his boss. The chorus professes "nobody knows why Bubba Rose shot his boss," but we all know why Bubba shot his boss--we all want to shoot our bosses. Each song reminds us we could kill for love or malice or for some perceived slight given half the chance. World without End unleashes these ghosts to warn us, to save us, from ourselves.

The settings of some of the songs are more than a hundred and fifty years old, but there's immediacy in them. The past rises up to warn us about our future. With the song about the Reconstruction of the South, one can't help but think about an occupying army currently in the Middle East trying to reconstruct a land that doesn't want to be reconstructed. And when the record talks about the battle of Shiloh, it reminds us about how the present-day United States is divided and unsure of itself. World without End breathes the air of these unsure times. Just as during the Civil War, America is unsure of who and what we are and what we will become.

Without shame, World Without End looks unflinchingly into the history of racism. Without moralizing, two of these songs look right into the past and own up to it. One song lets a Klansman speak about lynching. Another song lets the man who was lynched speak. The lesson of each ghost is that this could happen to you. From being on the receiving end of mob violence, to being caught up in the mob that unleashes the violence. The warning is that the grotesque and horrible is never far off, and is, truly, in each of us. The moral is that there's murder, justified or unjustified, in each of us given the right circumstances. America will always be a violent nation. There are guns in all our trunks. But if you listen to World Without End, you might rethink going on that rampage.

--Dustin Wells, San Francisco 10-2-06

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