Skeleton Closet by Salim Nourallah

Salim Nourallah’s latest album shades darker than Hit Parade, baiting shrugging, nonchalant hooks with lyrical content that is at least a little off and maybe downright poisoned. It’s always dangerous to conflate the “I” in the song with the “I” on the record credits, but you have to wonder what happened to Nourallah over the intervening two years. It wasn’t that long ago he was singing about his little girl and the ordinary struggles of family life. Now his songs are populated by blighted home towns (“The Bullies Are Back,” “This Town”), deadbeat dads (“Permanent Holiday”) and barbed, hurtful memories (“Tokens of Your Cruelty”).

Nourallah, as you might recall, sits at the nexus of a pretty excellent indie pop scene in Dallas, producing for the Old 97s and Nicholas Altobelli, sharing guest slots with the Deathray Davies’ John Dufilho. Skeleton Closet is a mostly solo effort, drawn from several years’ worth of home recording (some of the material predates Hit Parade), but it draws on the usual suspects — Dulfilho and others — to fill out some songs.

The result is an album that is loosely played but tightly conceived, its rough-edged accoutrements (drum machine, jangly acoustic guitar) wrapped around earwormy melodies. Nourallah’s voice is bruised but wholly compelling, injecting irony and worldweariness into the lines just by virtue of the way it breaks and bends around the tunes. The Beatles are the obvious touchstone, though with the sheen worn off and the obvious solutions subverted. Nourallah takes the back way around his catchy songs, letting us in through the alley where the dust blows around and the garbage is spoiling in the bin.

The songs range from guitar pop sketches to full-blown rock band arrangements with some interesting diversions into dub (“Two Years”) and Morricone-esque cinematics (“To the Desert”). You can tell how Nourallah makes his living by the way he finds distinctive, wholly appropriate settings for each tune; he is a producer here as much as a songwriter.

Yet the core of the effort is the songs, and it is in these warped, sardonic gems that Nourallah’s real skill unfolds. I like “Permanent Holiday” the best, a slice of jaundiced pop, about a guy who escapes domestic life for a Mexican surf town; when his wife sends a PI to find him, the PI disappears, too, into the title’s “permanent holiday.” Blithe and cheerful on the surface, darker underneath, the song celebrates the shirkers’ escape while also implying guilt and disconnection. It is ambiguous and unsettling and, also, catchy as hell.

“Tokens of Your Cruelty” is, likewise, subtle and nuanced, a post-break-up song about a narrator who obsessively tallies the damage. Yet even as he itemizes these tokens of cruelty, he also communicates the pull that the relationship still has on him.

It’s this masterful balance of the said and the unsaid, the hook and the unexpected kicker that set Salim Nourallah. Skeleton Closet is like a good novel, full of implications and shadowy contradictions and complexities. It’s pop craftsmanship with a touch of vertigo, an uneasy sense that something dangerous resides underneath.

Jennifer Kelly - Dusted (August 2015)

Tracklist

1.	Dead Man's Stare	3:15

2.	This Town	3:30

3.	The Bullies Are Back	3:53

4.	Terlingua	3:12

5.	Permanent Holiday	3:44

6.	Tokens of Your Cruelty	3:20

7.	Andalucia in the Spring	3:26

8.	Two Years	2:43

9.	Crocodiles	3:24

10.	2 Lizards	3:13

11.	To the Desert	2:56

12.	Prisoner	3:21

13.	Terlingua (boombox version)	3:27

14.	Guns of Glory (bonus track)	2:28

15.	Soldiers (bonus track)	5:27

16.	Two Years (acoustic version)	2:46

Credits

released August 1, 2015

"Rebuilding my life, post divorce, seriously slowed down the completion of this record. The first song, "Dead Man's Stare," was initially tracked back in 2010 when I brought The Treefort 5 in to make Hit Parade. "Two Years", which was about my late friend Carter Albrecht, had also been tracked during the Hit Parade sessions. I immediately set those two aside because I knew they were the path to a messier, stranger follow-up record.

Another contributing factor to "Skeleton Closet" sound was my budding musical relationship with guitarist, Nick Earl. Nick and I had been playing a lot together in The Travoltas and I was inspired by how inventive his playing was. Nick is a master at creating cinematic sonic soundscapes with a vast array of pedals and gadgets. I felt like The Travoltas weren't really the right vehicle to showcase his talents in the "other-worldly" department so I also enlisted his help with this record.

Another big influence on this record was the Optigan. It was an instrument originally manufactured by the toy company, Mattel, in the early 1970's. It played an optical disc that contained pre-recorded rhythm and keyboard tracks that you could use to build your own songs. The discs looked much like regular LP records. It was basically one of the first samplers, just like the Mellotron.

"Crocodiles" was done the same way after I simply wrote down the title, because it sounded like something that should be on a record called Skeleton Closet.

It took me so long to complete Skeleton Closet that I actually had two separate crowd funding drives, one at the start to pay for recording costs and then another as I got closer to the record's release. I no longer had record label support behind me as I'd ruined my relationship with Tapete when I bailed on playing in Spain. I miraculously raised $28,000 between the two pledge drives and was able to cover all the costs of releasing and promoting Skeleton Closet. I was even able to pay all my friends who played on it!

The artwork had also taken forever to complete because I'd lost my long-time collaborator, Jayme. She had played a huge role in the photography and design of most of my album covers spanning 2003 to 2012. I finally asked Bob Schneider if he'd help after several misfires from other designers. I sent him a blown out photo that I'd taken of myself laying in the grass one afternoon. I was pretty sure I was having a nervous breakdown when I snapped it, so it somehow felt like a fitting image for this album.

Skeleton Closet also spawned the Boombox Experiment. I attempted two full band performances of material from the album in May 2014 and wasn't happy with how it translated. After that I decided to make special mixes of songs then dub them to cassette. I found a 1979 Panasonic boombox to be my trusty touring companion for the next two years and worked up a one man show with my 1964 Guild Mark I acoustic guitar and bullet mic.

An entirely new performing persona emerged for me during this time. Kind of a fusion between Travoltas' punk Sinatra guy and solo singer-songwriter guy. The boombox shows spanned all of 2015 through 2016. I even spent a couple weeks opening for the Old 97's on a West Coast/Pacific Northwest run. It was a trip walking out on expansive stages to play to big crowds with just an acoustic guitar and a rickety boombox."

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