PRE-ORDER: Crooked Fingers "Swet Deth" LP

One afternoon, Eric Bachmann’s son returned from school with a sheath of pictures he’d drawn, all of them macabre. “There were crows and sinister figures with scythes and tombstones,” he recalls. On one, he had written ‘DETH, SWET DETH,’ and everything clicked in my head.” Swet Deth, Bachmann’s first album under his Crooked Fingers moniker after a 15-year hiatus, organized itself around the image: its songs are about death, yes, but there’s a sweetness to them, a wry sensibility to his lyrics that comes from having experienced many kinds of death and the life that follows in its wake.

“Crooked Fingers” is a historically slippery concept — no two albums sound alike or feature the same lineup in studio or on tour. Hearing parts in these songs that called for instruments he didn’t play or vocals that weren’t in his register, he found himself expanding the roster of guest musicians further than he had on any album in his catalog, including Sharon Van Etten (“Haunted”), The National’s Matt Berninger (“From All Ways”), and Superchunk’s Mac McCaughan (“Cold Waves”). But first he started with family, friends, and frequent collaborators. Jon Rauhouse plays pedal steel. Bachmann’s wife, Liz Durrett, contributes vocals, as do members of his touring band, Skylar Gudasz and Avery Leigh Draut (of Night Palace).

There is a freedom to this collection of songs, a groove to them that would belie their agonies and anxieties were mere death the album’s point and not what comes before. For Eric Bachmann, that has been growth, as a musician and as a man. Like the tree sprouting from the graveyard on its cover, Swet Deth is surprising and lush, a shock of color against its morbid landscape, proof of life in the shadow of its opposite. “RIP Eric Bachmann,” one tombstone reads. As Crooked Fingers, he’s never felt more alive.