Written by: Dave Cantrell

So, OK, look. We’ve been on this train several times before and were pretty fucking convinced it had delivered us, with great glory and some wonderfully perverse prosletyzin’, to every station of the proverbial cross imaginable but hell and damnation we should have known better as wouldn’tcha know it we woke up this morning to another fresh dose of the Mortal Prophets gospel delivered to our front door like some blessed abandoned baby that’s already wiser to the ways of the world that we will ever be. This one’s named, with a dash of premonitory panache, “Hell or High Water” and even when heard through the permanently jaded filters that enshroud our ears it still retains the deathless jounce of a tale told by a rasp-throated troubadour named John Beckmann who has somehow, aganst God’s odds, continued to dodge every one of them hellhounds that have clawed the tailcoats of his contemporaries to shreds. Yes, dear devoted reader, you’ve most certainly met this beast in these pages before, thrice to be exact (here’s the perhaps the most definitive in that it also sports a quick but incisive interview with Beckmann) and yes we’ve heard the guy’s unkillable take on modernized, mid-century, urban American blues before but sometimes, if one listens with the right amount of care and prayer – if, in other words, we’re as lucky as some schmuck chosen via the immutable wisdom of the Fates – we hear a new spirit speaking in the wind and, like the happily hopeless devotees we are, we’re once again entranced by a seductive force beyond our reckoning. It’s what music does, or at least what it’s capable of doing and there are few more capable musical hands out there forging songcraft for our edification than Mr. Beckmann. Witness, for instance, new single “Hell or High Water” off soon-to-be-released EP Sleeping in My Bed which SEM has the deliciously distinct pleasure of premiering for every single sorry soul in this wicked world. Built around a railroad-moaning harmonica motif forlorn enough to make Ennio Morricone weep, awash in bluesy atmospherics that harken ghosts from just about every tombstoned corner of that legendary lineage and yet with something of a cagey but sincere warmth that lays resistance flat on its back and takes whatever advantage it wishes, the song is a concise, sensurround masterpiece, a three-minute forty-five second ode to that most basic of complex, umm, mortal imperatives, want. None of which can possibly surprise since all that has come forth prior to this sentence you’re reading right now has been naught but testimony as to the true essence of Mr. Beckmann’s craft. These songs come out like emanations, like pulses pulsing from the pulpy sweet heart of every cynic there’s ever been that, as it turns out, beats with love despite itself. Welcome back, ye Mortal Prophet, and thanks. We know that no matter how hellish the hell, how high the high water, you’ll still come back to us like a messenger come round the mountain.