Credit: Elija Kulmer
January 18, 2024: Today, Son Of The Velvet Rat shared the new single “Rosary”off their forthcoming album Ghost Ranch, out on March 22 via Fluff & Gravy / Missing Piece Records. The track, which also arrives with a music video, features guest vocals from Jolie Holland.
“‘Rosary’ is about the dichotomy and hypocrisy of today’s perception of reality,” Georg Altziebler, one half of the folk-noir duo, explains to Americana Highways. “While it’s inspired by an outsider’s view of US-society, it certainly describes similar tendencies in Europe as well. The song is written from a schoolboy’s perspective. It’s Sunday morning and the sun is shining. Mom has gone to church and her boy is playing with daddy’s gun. He’s thinking about his birthday, the bullies in school and what the gun could do for him.”
Son of the Velvet Rat is the alter ego of songwriter Georg Altziebler and his wife Heike Binder, who a decade ago left their hometown of Graz, Austria and the cloistered safety of the Continent for the endless highway of America. They came to rest in Joshua Tree, on the edge of California’s Mojave Desert. They are known for their jagged folk-pop melodies and forbidding ballads, infusing the cabaret traditions of Old World masters like Georges Brassens, Jacques Brel and Fabrizio De André with the Old Testament prophecy and Kabbalistic visions of Townes Van Zandt, Leonard Cohen and Bob Dylan.
On September 9th, 2022 at the Harrison House in Joshua Tree, Georg and Heike debuted a collection of songs that would later comprise Ghost Ranch. A sacred space to present these new pieces, stripped-down to their most essential elements: two voices; one gruff and anchoring baritone, the other lifting in weathered hope, over six strings danced upon by Georg’s possessed spider-fingers, every note plucked with intention. A bare-boned outpouring, reverberating through the House like Midnight Mass in a rare church brave enough to explore the complexities of love. That night would have to be preserved in the amber of memory until Georg and Heike would properly document the pieces at Gar Robertson’s Red Barn Studio in Morongo Valley the following spring, before finishing the album in Austria.
On Ghost Ranch, drum loops and saloon piano, violin and cicada drones, hanging chimes and pounded metal combine to create a jittery soundtrack for all the true believers and false messiahs, county fairs and shooting ranges, all delivered in what fan and collaborator Lucinda Williams once called Georg’s “great sexy-gravelly voice,” leavened by Heike’s translucent harmonies, like roses circling a tattooed heart. (Paul Cullum/Gabriel Hart)
