Shot in the Dark

David E. Williams puts a spotlight on ugliness and sticks a lamp where the sun don't shine.

by A.D. Amorosi | Photo by Michael T. Regan

David E. Williams’ albums are like the Mütter Museum. They’re filled with ugly but strikingly human medical oddities. Scabbed, scarred and tumorous inside and out.

His last album -- I Have Forgotten How to Love You, released in 1996 -- is a collection of songs so sad and vicious it takes your breath away. But not before you stifle that sick little giggle crawling up your throat.

Williams is no novice to comically morose text or merry widow waltzes, having released sorrow-soaked, angry, electronic overtures since 1988. These albums are not for the faint of heart. Often tagged as "gothic," his rare works are not the ghoulish goulash of cartoon latex and faux fangs you see on CD shop shelves. Instead, they feel and sound as horror-struck and real as a heart attack. That kind of pain is infectious. Why hasn't he written or recorded more over the years?

"There are a lot of reasons, all of them pretty uncool and unromantic: old age, exhaustion, the soul-sucking tyranny of a day job," -- the specifics of which he won't discuss -- "the absence of any real clamor from adoring acolytes," says Williams, nearing 40. "To some degree, the music world has passed its final judgment on this old fuck."

Whether you've heard him or not, reserve judgment for Hope Springs a Turtle (Old Europa Cafe), his first disc of neoclassical avant-electronics, eerie art-pop and crotchety cabaret tunes in eight years.

Like all of Williams' work, Turtle falls into two lyrical categories: savagely romantic dialogues ("Carmina Melanoma") and those that have inner monologues ("The Need for Less Sex in the World") wafting through their forensically detailed pathologies, like the thought bubbles that drift through Eugene O' Neill's Strange Interlude. Or as he puts it: "The self-indulgent versus the slice of life."

"When the lyric is done, it's grafted onto whatever piece of music I happen to be working on independently at the same time," says Williams. "Hmmm, I guess I just gave away the secret of the incongruity between certain hate-filled, violent lyrics and their accompanying upbeat melodies."

Like a sniper, Williams the songwriter is deadly precise. He's also sometimes shocking for the sake of shocking. Crooned like a gutted Peter Murphy, "The Need for Less Sex in the World" is a shaggy-dog story told in the third person omniscient -- "The characters are less like shaggy dogs and more like sea monkeys in my personal aquarium," he offers -- wherein a closeted gay fellow, after prostituting a homeless guy, is found murdered with a lamp up his asshole. Williams is a storyteller first and a "moralist by accident."

In the original idea for "Need" -- a song that nearly didn't make it onto the new album because of an unintentional Tori Amos feel -- it was the homeless guy who was murdered. "Now, that's somehow too Marxist for my taste," laughs Williams. The rendition on Hope is the "more classically tragic version," wherein romantic notions are shattered by bad-smelling sex and a worse-smelling lamp. To Williams, this is realism.

Bruce Springsteen is often tagged as a realistic songwriter, but you have to laugh at the lame tameness of that description. Though Williams doubts this sort of anal light-fixture death knell happens on a regular basis, the power dynamics behind the concept are common indeed. Call it lyrical S&M pornography. Or relentless nihilism.

"Art school transgressionist crap" is a description Williams has heard, too.

He sees himself simply as a little songwriter painting little pictures of the world.

"Actually, my songs are very much in the Springsteen rock 'n' roll troubadour mode. I just happen to think my little pictures are much more accurate in describing real life -- abortions and what not. I could be wrong, but kill me if I ever write a song with a car in it."

He pauses.

"Well, I do have a song with a Chevy 4x4, but the trunk is filled with blood and urine."

In "Need" and other like-minded monologues, Williams seeks a form of resolution and absolution, whether good or bad. "Everyone gets what they deserve. The high sacrament of secular humanism -- a kind of laissez-faire libertinism -- is always rewarded with degeneration and death."

In his own mind, it's a toss-up whether or not "Need" is to be taken seriously.

"I'm not bothered by any so-called inappropriate reaction," he laughs. "If I can keep that poor little goth kid out of the noose for three or four minutes, then I consider the song a success no matter what his or her reaction."