It’s rare these days to find an album that feels lived in. So much of modern rock is polished within an inch of its life; auto-tuned, compressed, and algorithmically optimized until every trace of humanity has been surgically removed. Until They Burn Me want absolutely nothing to do with that. Their new record, A Carnival of Reveries, feels like it was recorded in a room that still smells faintly of cigarette smoke, sweat, and spilled whiskey. This is not a complaint. It’s a celebration.
The production throughout A Carnival of Reveries is refreshingly organic; everything sounds close, imperfect, alive. There’s no digital sheen, no click-track precision. You can hear fingers slide on strings, the rasp of a throat between verses, the faint hum of amplifiers when a chord fades. That texture matters. It’s what separates this record from so many contemporary “roots revival” albums that mistake nostalgia for authenticity. Carlyle and Jordan don’t want to recreate the past; they’re trying to extend it; to see what happens when the blues gets older without losing its teeth.
Until They Burn Me is Cody Carlyle and Travis Jordan, two musicians who’ve been playing together for over three decades, most notably in their earlier band The Dry Season. In 2021, they formalized their next chapter: a collaboration that draws from folk, blues, country, and punk, but filters it through a uniquely ragged sense of grace. What emerges is something like modern blues storytelling; music for people who’ve seen too much, laughed through it anyway, and found a tune that could carry them home.
A Carnival of Reveries is aptly named. The album moves like a traveling sideshow; rough, colorful, unpredictable, and full of small miracles. Each song offers another vignette of loss, redemption, and the strange joy that comes from refusing to give up.
The opening track, “Dark & Deep,” sets the tone immediately: a growling guitar riff, a voice smoked over hickory, and a rhythm section that moves like a slow train at midnight. Carlyle and Jordan have said the song was inspired by Blind Willie Johnson, and you can hear that lineage loud and clear; the rawness, the moral gravity, the sense that you’re listening to someone tell you something half-confessional, half-divine. It’s a rare thing in modern blues-rock: a song that doesn’t imitate but inhabits the tradition. You can almost hear the floorboards creak beneath it.
Then there’s “To the Bone,” a deceptively upbeat track about aging and acceptance. The lyrics wrestle with the passage of time and that uncomfortable realization that youth isn’t coming back, though something else might take its place. The blues has always been about transformation; about turning heartbreak into motion and this song nails that. The guitars shimmer and slide; the percussion feels like a heartbeat that won’t quite settle down. It’s the sound of a band leaning into maturity without ever sounding tired.
This is where things start to get strange. “Licorice & Lollipops,” written thirty years ago, carries an uncanny tone: part dream, part fever. It’s sweet, yes, but never comforting. There’s something rotten beneath the surface, a quiet warning disguised as a waltz. The vocals are deliberately obscured, mixed just enough to make the lyrics feel like they’re whispering secrets from another room. It’s unsettling, and that’s the point. The band has called it a cynical look at how we sugarcoat the darkness around us, and the production matches perfectly; a little sticky, a little sickly, and completely captivating.
The blues has always loved simplicity, and “Dig Them Graves” takes that ethic to heart. Written in two hours and recorded in two days, it sounds as if it could have been captured in a single take and that immediacy is haunting. A war song without pageantry, it doesn’t rage or lament; it observes. The detached narration of violence is almost more disturbing than outrage would be. The riff repeats like a marching rhythm, steady and unyielding, while the vocals slide between resignation and warning. There’s something beautifully wrong about it, the way old field hollers were both hymns and dirges.
After that darkness, “Revealed to Him in the Wild” feels like a deep breath. It’s blues as philosophy; patient, open, reverent. The lyrics describe a moment of quiet revelation, a recognition of how small and miraculous we are in the vastness of everything else. It’s less about religious enlightenment than awe: that old blues idea that wisdom doesn’t arrive through study but through surviving. The guitar tone here is warmer, the tempo slower, as if the song itself is kneeling down.
Every record needs a closer that sums up the journey, and “Josef K” is exactly that; theatrical, slightly unhinged, yet somehow joyous. A song that’s been gestating for thirty years, it bears layers of history baked into every measure. The rhythm swings like a carnival ride on the verge of breaking down while the lyrics dance between absurdism and revelation. The band calls it “the form it was always meant to take,” and it does feel final, like a curtain call. The instrumentation builds toward chaos but never loses control. There’s laughter in the despair, and that’s the essence of what makes this band’s sound so human.
What’s striking about A Carnival of Reveries is that these songs don’t long for the past; they wrestle with it. Every track feels like a conversation between who these musicians were and who they’ve become. It’s folk-punk stripped of its teenage fury and blues-rock stripped of its swagger; what’s left is the bone-deep honesty that both genres were always reaching for.
Until They Burn Me don’t sound like anyone else on A Carnival of Reveries because they don’t seem to care who they’re supposed to sound like. They’re too busy following the pulse that’s carried them for thirty years; that steady, stubborn rhythm that says, we’re still here. And really, that’s the most blues thing there is.
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About the Author
A tenured media critic known working as a ghost writer, freelance critic for various publications around the world, the former lead writer of review blogspace Atop The Treehouse and content creator for Manila Bulletin.
