Left a funny taste in my mouth: David E. Williams, A House for The Dead and a Porch for The Dying

1994 was an excellent year for music. Among the great albums released that year, we have a ridiculous pile to choose from: Let Love In, The Downward Spiral, Superunknown, Grace, Bury the Bottle With Me, and so on, any two of which qualify ‘94 as “excellent,” despite anything horrible released the same year. However, one album that most of us probably don’t remember as a charter member of the Defining Albums of The Year of Our Lord 1994 Club is David E. Williams’ A House for The Dead and a Porch for The Dying. Aside from the fact that it was released on a little-known independent label at a time when many talented artists and bands had been recognized by the mainstream market, there are other reasons why Williams is an artist far from being a household name.

First, let me give you a little background on my introduction to David E. Williams. It was sometime in my second year of college, maybe the Spring semester of 2002, on a sunny day when a friend and I were wandering through the campus commons building and passed by a first floor student affairs office. Sitting on the counter were several milk crates of CDs that they were giving away. The CDs were all leftovers from when OCCC had a campus radio station; since the station had been shut down for a long time, they decided to dump the CDs on whatever cheapskates wanted them. Being the cheapskate packrat that I am, I nabbed a couple obscure and completely worthless titles solely to throw the discs away and keep the jewel cases as extras in the event I broke the case on an album I actually cared about. One album, though, caught my eye, and it was titled A House for The Dead and a Porch for The Dying.

The first thing that struck me was the absolutely stunning stained-glass cover image, made by Judith Schaecter. The title also grabbed me; although long and wordy, it had a distinctly sarcastic yet poetic feel. Since the CDs were free, I figured I’d give it a shot.

A House for The Dead and a Porch for The Dying is a very 1980s-style synth-goth affair that might go over better if the lyrics weren’t a descent into the very bowels of everything distasteful in the history of mankind. Williams sings monotone of violent misogyny, incestuous gang-rape and the abortion that follows, a quadruple amputee prostitute, assorted Nazi imagery, graphic torture, and other ghastly and unpleasant things. While these are topics that can be depicted musically in a compelling manner that evokes a pretty powerful emotional response, Williams takes to the task with a deranged, almost gleeful, wit that implies the man is completely batty. Thankfully, Williams’ voice is so bland and flat and barely distinguishable from the music that you can’t make out half of what he’s saying. This is one of the rare occasions that I would have preferred the album not come with printed lyrics. Reading through them recently, I couldn’t help but feel nauseated to the point I had to drop them and leave the room. He comes off like William S. Burroughs in the event that Burroughs was outright psychotic and not writing with a pretentious surrealistic flair.

Unfortunately, the lyrics are the only aspect of this album that stand out. The music isn’t anything worth raving about, something of a cross between electro-pop and goth. Not to say that the tunes are bad, just nothing special or unique. You could probably dig around the first or second wave of goth music and turn up something with the same or similar sound and monotone dirge singing without the grotesque monstrosities coming out of the vocalist’s mouth.

Some people regard this man as an absolute genius, and to a degree, I can see how some might respect him. He isn’t afraid to unload all sorts of hideous things onto a CD and put it up for sale on unsuspecting consumers, and, to be fair, he’s not a bad lyricist. It’s his subject matter that is the primary turn-off, which leads me to believe that part of the attraction to A House for The Dead and a Porch for The Dying might be the juxtaposition of very electro-pop instrumentation and disturbing imagery. His myspace bio describes his work thusly:

…a lyrical humor so dark that it's not really funny. Some might call it gallows humor, but "gas chamber humor" is a bit more accurate for his love songs rife with murder, abuse and obscure references to eating.

A mostly true statement, but I wouldn’t quite call these love songs. Maybe love songs in Hell, though. The entire album is like a rattling slow-moving elevator down to Satan’s frozen lake at the 9^th level. With a droning, overly witty blood-soaked clown clothed in his own entrails hanging over your shoulder, cracking tasteless jokes the entire ride.

The only reason I hold onto this is that it’s out of print and a bit of a rarity (although having the campus radio station call letters^* written all over it may diminish its collector’s value). Maybe someday, I’ll offload it onto some poor sap on eBay, but I’d feel guilty for letting someone else allow this sort of sick trash into their music collection. But who am I kidding? The album is available as an mp3 download through SNOCAP for ten bucks, which is $9.99⁹⁹ too much if you ask me, and peer-to-peer provides just about every obscure artist you could ask for. If you are into this sort of unhinged crap, then feel free to go to his website, listen to some samples, read the lyrics, and pursue this man’s music as you see fit. Just make sure the nurses hook you back up to your thorazine drip when you’re done.



David E. Williams website and myspace, but don’t say I didn’t warn you.


^*Curiously, I acquired the CD at OCCC, but the call letters on the CD are WFNP, the campus radio station for SUNY New Paltz, the college I later transferred to. Weird.