Album reviews

Dead Men Tell A Thousand Tales
Mikelangelo and the Black Sea Gentlemen
Inertia
✭✭✭✭

This is the first CD I can recommend on the strength of its liner notes alone. It is a wonderful piece of short fiction that neatly bypasses the band's Australian origins and instead has them sent packing from their debauched spiritual home in a Yugoslav hotel under a curse personally delivered by Tito. Happily, the album measures up to the ambition of this creation myth with a slab of dark cabaret that mixes everything from klezmer to Tex-Mex and wild-west gothic and simmers the lot in a cauldron of Balkan fatalism. With the very able assistance of his gentlemen (who sport names as superb as Guido Libido and Rufino the Catalan Casanova), Mikelangelo's lugubrious bass-baritone is the perfect guide to the band's visceral violin, clarinet and accordion flavoured adventures amid death and the whispering of angels. But the chief character is the Devil, who is not so much embraced here as taken on a bender. And when it all gets overwhelming, there's sage advice aplenty, not least this line in The Devil's Wedding "The only way to find the way back home again is to grab the sow by its milky teats". Death may rule the day, but this is some of the most alive music I've heard in a long while.

James Jeffery
The Australian

Dead Men Tell A Thousand Tales
Mikelangelo and the Black Sea Gentlemen
Inertia

To live we must die. Many a culture far older and wiser than our own tell tales that rejoice in the part that death plays in celebrating and enjoying life. Mikelangelo and his Black Sea Gentlemen know this, they revel in it. Dead Men Tell a Thousand Tales – most of them well worth listening to – throws back to an era of dark cabaret, twisted tales, and smoke-filled cavernous venues. Hark the Moricone inspired Ten Long Years in the Saddle (Waiting for Death to Come) – and we have all been there - take up an invite to The Devil’s Wedding – what do you bring as a gift for the devils who has all of eternity? Or perhaps you are understanding that It’s a Struggle to be Human some days. There are not enough Balkan folk bands in Sydney, and by gosh we have missed the piano accordion since the demise of Weddings, Parties, Anything. Whether they hail from Communist Yugoslavia or the outer limits of Tempe; Mikey and his Gentlemen friends understand how to compose a tale of death, joy and dark humour and I’ll drink from my tankard to that.

*** 1/2

Chris Peken
Alternative Media Group of Australia 21 July 2009

Dead Men Tell A Thousand Tales
Mikelangelo and the Black Sea Gentlemen
Inertia

They describe their act as ‘kabaret noir’, and it fits.
Behind the façade of Mikelangelo & The Black Sea Gentlemen, there lurks … well, I don’t really know. They’ve hidden their real identities, so I have to take them at face value – even though the members have such improbable names as Guido Libido and Rufino the Catalan Casanova. But they’ve been touring this country since 2000 (so take with a large dose of salt their claims to have emerged from Communist Yugoslavia and to have wowed the crowds in Kirov). But, as their name implies, their musical hearts are in eastern Europe, with Balkan folk, gypsy, klezmer and other traditional feels portrayed with accordion, clarinet fiddle and double bass. It’s all then cranked up on this third album with a vaudevillian exaggeration that pushes these apparently sonorous, serious songs about death and dissipation into mock-epic melodrama. And frontman Mikelangelo has a theatrical baritone to boost the sense of shadowy cabaret here. So tracks like The Struggle To Be Human and The Devil’s Wedding work on two levels – dank and mysterious, but also darkly comic. If you’re still not in on the joke, try Ten Long Years In The Saddle (Waiting For Death To Come) – it’s like Johnny Cash lost in Romania. Overtly comedic visual cues make their concept work better live, but there’s enough here to have you joining in on the noir-ish fun.       
***½
BILL HOLDSWORTH - Rave Magazine, Brisbane, 8 July 2009