Amigo the Devil by Visions of the Abyss

How many searing emotional experiences can you squeeze into a single album? Yours Until the War is Over by Amigo The Devil answers this question vividly. There’s romance, damnation, intoxication, regret, and characters and narrators in various states of disrepair: pleading on the phone, blackout drunk in an Applebees, “loaded on ketamine and heartbreak” or turning a trip to the store for booze into a bloody gas station holdup. Amigo The Devil’s latest album is a gallery of fallible humanity, each song morosely honest or hideously comic, with music and words that soak down into your bones.

The person behind The Devil, Miami-born, Austin-based Danny Kiranos, is a madman through his many voices, rasps, screams, and spoken word interludes, all steeped in a folkloric atmosphere that he’s been refining ever since he started turning heads in the previous decade with songs such as “Hell and You” and “Perfect Wife.” Yours Until the War is Over is this unsparing view of life distilled into an unskippable album.

Tracks such as “Garden of Leaving” and “Closer” employ stripped-back arrangements to painfully open and re-open wounds between Kiranos and an unspecified other. And then all tension is made light with a number like “One Day at a Time,” a jolly, heartbroken song about self-destruction.

Labeling Amigo the Devil as just “folk” is deceptive and a little cruel to listeners who would pass him by because they think folk equals country. “Murderfolk,” as one Spotify playlist calls it, comes closer to describing Kiranos’ raw storytelling and the sense of unease bred by his spooky banjo and mournful guitar playing. There is no talk of pickup trucks or chewing tobacco, only blunt acknowledgements of reality and, on 2015’s “One Kind of People,” chants of “People who die.”

Despite its often dark and solitary cast, Amigo The Devil’s music takes on a shared quality in concert, and Kiranos radiates gratitude for audiences that appreciate how well-made this music is.

Amigo the Devil, with TK & The Holy Know Nothings and Suzanne Santo, performs 7pm Tuesday, September 17 at Respectable Street in West Palm Beach  amigothedevil.com ~ erik kvarnberg