The Walnut Room

A.M. Arscott (of Bone Orchard Revival)

Reared in the dusky twilight of Michigan industry and baptized on its haunted shores, Bone Orchard Revival offers Sunday morning lovesick hymnals to break your back and harmonies to mend it, with siren songs sweet and sultry as a Saturday night.

At once angels’ trumpets and devils’ trombones, Adam M. Arscott and company deliver olde-time country, gospel and blues-influenced songs steeped in love, loss, desire and delicious strangers. Bone Orchard Revival’s sound is laden with high lonesome harmonies, ethereal melodies and an unyielding sense of reverence for the trails blazed by those who have hoisted this rag before them. The listener will swoon with that familiar glow as undertones and influences rear their heads, from the Carter Family to Tom Waits, The Handsome Family to Willie Nelson, the strings of Nashville to the line workers of Detroit. Songs unfold like travelogues, revealing steam engine days long gone, heads full with whiskey, ghost moons over sleeping cities, salvation for the sinner and those all too frequent evenings when you wind up using parking meters as walking sticks.

Bone Orchard Revival features Scott Waknin (drums), Grant Netzorg (lead guitar), Erich Harbowy (bass) and Nicole Morris (vocals).

With music like the patent medicines of days past, Bone Orchard Revival may just be the cure for what ails your weary modern soul.

Review of ‘Hush Money Hymnals’ album from Current magazine, Ann Arbor MI:

“Stark and theatric, yarn-spinning ditties rapt with the heartbroken haunting of southern blues, Americana and roots revival, Bone Orchard Revival presents Hush Money Hymnals (from ‘08, on Sinister Soul). Beautiful harmonies, jangled guitars and the shivery accoutrements of chimes, bass booms and light trodden percussion like a locomotive (cotton fields are generally flat). Adam M. Arscott and Jeni Lee Richey cast a flavorful, sepia-toned scene of twilight balladry, with the smell of a crackling bonfire and the capricious melodic wave of a ghost drifting through cavernous rooms of a house. George Jones, Townes Van Zandt and Tom Waits are inevitable reference points for this duo, both very passionate and talented contributors to Ann Arbor’s
unique folk/rock scene. (Key tracks: “Three Bottle Betty” and “Ahab’s Wife.”)"