#365songs (138 / 365)

The bottom slice of bitter bread in a sandwich in the middle of Fox Confessor Brings the Flood. The other slice is the title track. The sweet filling is the weirdly chipper pseudo-spiritual "John Saw That Number," which I always endured because I knew "Dirty Knife" was up next.

Fox Confessor as a whole is pretty opaque but a lot of its songs seem to circle around people suffering losses, driven to extremes or losing their grip on reality — and "Dirty Knife" is the starkest, darkest example. The first half is spare and foreboding enough with its lyric of "so suddenly, madness came," fingerpicked guitar and pizzicato upright bass, but shortly after Case intones the title it takes a turn for the macabre. The fingerpicking becomes frantic, the pizzicato becomes slashes of a bow. The singing becomes, rather hauntingly, Ukrainian. I like a genuinely scary song and "Dirty Knife" ain't no fuckin "Monster Mash."