After nearly a decade of songwriting in a gothic-folk tradition often tinged with early ’90s grunge, Keith J.G. McCurdy drew from a deeper well in crafting Vudu Sister’s 2021 EP, Burnt Offerings. As a Classics and English double major with a minor in Medieval Studies at the University of Rhode Island, he empathized with the heroines written into the poetry of Ovid’s Heroides and the tragedy of The Oresteia by Aeschylus. With the support of URI grant funding, McCurdy worked under the mentorship of Dr. Daniel Carpenter, to meld academic and musical interests into songs and lyrics in Latin and Ancient Greek that voice the pain of these goddesses of myth:
“Rapiebar ut tenebra / Subterra recluserat,” McCurdy intoned. “Οἱ ἄνεμοι ἔχοντες ἡσυχίαν / ἐπί τῇ εὐρείᾳ θαλάττῃ.”
“I was snatched as the dark / Under-earth had opened.”
“The winds having silence / Over the wide sea.”
Vudu Sister started as a solo project, with a folksy 2011 debut, Bastard Children. Recording with Ben Knox Miller of The Low Anthem at Providence’s Columbus Theatre, Household Items in 2013 ventured into jangly alt-rock, while 2016’s Mortis Nervosa allowed for what McCurdy describes as a “visceral catharsis,” or “a spiritual bloodletting.” Each album expanded the range of songwriting that fed the narrative and linguistic creativity of Burnt Offerings. The latest album, Adynata — a Greek term chosen by McCurdy for its rhetorical and literary meaning of “impossible tasks” — returns Vudu Sister to the English language and introspection found in the first person.
“In addition to my love of fairy tales, antiquated literature, and ancient arcana, I wanted something that evoked a sense of weight akin to Sisyphus’s boulder,” said McCurdy.
With Diane O’Connor on violin, Isabel Castellvi on cello, and Emma Newton on harp and piano, Adynata weaves elegance throughout a pervasive and penetrating heaviness. In support of the album, McMurdy played solo sets in March at The Quencher in Newport, Arcane Mead in Providence, and Sons of Liberty in Kingston, with the full band joined by Eryka Fir of Westerly and Long Kate of Providence for a record release party at Myrtle in East Providence.
McCurdy said he tends to avoid “overt political themes” in his songwriting but instead aims to “imbue a more abstract approach.” Like the figures from ancient lore embodied on Burnt Offerings, Vudu Sister’s abstractions treat the present day within a greater continuum, including recurring imagery from near and distant histories and weaving connections across time.
“I think in retrospect, the strongest motif I seem to have kept revisiting was an abstract idea of home, finding home, and/or not feeling at home where one resides,” said McCurdy.
As an artist in Providence, McCurdy credits the influence of H.P. Lovecraft’s novella The Shadow Over Innsmouth and short story “The Call of Cthulhu” as setting examples of alienation within the notion of home, which informs the lyrics and sound of “Non-Euclidean Geometry.”
On “The Valley” — which McCurdy said “might be the bleakest, darkest song I have in my catalog” — allusions to the world’s holy sites are set in proximity to images of rot and ruin.
“Under the Light of the Moon,” constructs a ghost story as a gothic ballad recounting a woman returning from the dead to seek revenge on the men who had wronged her in life.
“Black Flowers” in ways responds to Lord Byron’s 1816 poem “Darkness;” its vaunted sensuality finds the world “void” and “the populous and the powerful” as a “lump of death:”
I had a dream, which was not all a dream.
The bright sun was extinguish’d, and the stars
Did wander darkling in the eternal space,
Rayless, and pathless, and the icy earth…
“In this black hour when hope has died,” McCurdy echoes the “pathless” and “icy earth” of Byron on Vudu Sister’s lament, not all is lost, for “the figure I’ve found looks gorgeous in bloom.”
McCurdy credits “Having Trouble Sleeping” as emerging from a month spent in Sicily, Italy in 2021 and discovering a place where he found a temporary, previously unknown sense of peace.
And the closing track, “Passage of Ships,” again steers through apocalyptic themes and the hereafter, dipping into waters akin to Mad Season’s “River of Deceit.” The 1995 single from the supergroup’s sole studio album Above was heralded for bringing together members of Alice in Chains, Pearl Jam, Screaming Trees, and The Walkabouts. The band’s brief existence followed individual addictions as a collaborative pursuit of rehabilitation, attempting to excise demons while caught in an era of modern mythmaking and fighting the currents to avoid drowning.
“There is a lot of darkness with little glimmers of light poking through,” McCurdy said about Adynata. “The lyrical material offers some semblance of hope in these dark places.”
# # #
Vudu Sister’s fifth album Adynata is available digitally via Bandcamp and for purchase on vinyl, CD, and cassette. Follow @vudusister on Instagram for upcoming performances.