Zeno Jones – Butcher Shop Blues
White Diamond Records
13 Tracks – 41 Minutes
Louisville, Kentucky’s Zeno Jones delivers another top-notch effort. Zeno is a three-time semi-finalist at the IBC in Memphis His previous album, Disillusion Blues was one of the five albums selected as finalists for the 2024 IBC’s Best Self-Produced Album. For those who have not seen Zeno perform, He is a one-man band playing his guitars, foot suitcase drum, cymbals and tambourine. What you hear on the album, is a one-time live take on each song which he would duplicate in front of an audience.
The album develops a concept that he develops throughout the album, each song interlinking to previous songs. From the title, you would surmise this is a story about someone who sells meat at your local grocery, but is it? Remember that the definition of a butcher is also “a person who kills indiscriminately or brutally”. This underlying play on the term leaves in doubt where the subject character actually lies. The opening cut establishes “The Butcher” with a mixture of a dialogue from a man going to the meat market and the butcher’s eyes on him as he says he “will sell you some twine and paper- keep your soul from spilling out on the floor”. “I’ll leave behind a killing floor – you can lick it clean – you gonna pay me rent on my floor or I’m bound to get mean”. Zeno’s guitar and vocals get more intense and even frenetic as he shifts to the butcher’s voice. On “Block” he notes “there’s too many bull cows, they all over this town…I can’t see nothing but that bloody Butcher man – he raises the cleaver whenever I raise my hand”. Send my body down river, have that steamboat bring me home.”
He takes a brief respite with an instrumental “Cut” before shifting into the title track as he notes that these “Butcher Block Blues” “are killing me”. “Nothing thrills me like burning fancy clothes, breaking chandeliers, and stained- glass windows.” “Don’t rag on me, I’ll burn your house down”. Next comes “I’m in the backdoor hanging waiting to be sold – this is the last time “I’ll ever feel so cold til they “Smoke Me”. Are these the imposed thoughts of a dead animal? On “Bled Dry” the man cites “I can’t walk no bridge, can’t look down no well – my children cry I sit up on that shelf too much whiskey drink.” and notes “this cleaver is killing me real slow – one more chop I swear it will be done tomorrow”.
“Chop” provides another instrumental interlude. “10c Nickel” finds the man now “living in the engine room of a gas- powered steamboat that butcher man paid my fare”. So, is this an accomplice or the man running from his past? “Steamboat” tells of the sinking of the steamboat requiring the require crew to escape in a lifeboat. “Lockman’s Toll” is another brief slow instrumental leading into “Knife”. He states, “I got this knife in my hand, I’ve been keeping this edge for years “I’m gonna carve my name out of something on somewhere so somebody knows someone was here”.
As life as a farmer selling burley and working on a steamboat failed, things increase in intensity again on “Honing Steel” as he proclaims “I can hear it – that scraping sound – that steel is coming down “. He laments the life that never was as he cries “you’ve been “Gone So Long” I can’t feel your touch – I used to dream about you, but it’s gone”.
And we leave this deeply cinematic, and dark tale of an obsessed man who certainly had dark thoughts if not actions. Zeno’s music is embedded in the Hill Country sound of R.L Burnside, Junior Kimbrough and Charley Patton with consummate guitar, powerhouse vocals and underlying percussion. Zeno tells a dire, but totally intriguing, story that will keep you invested and perhaps produce an occasional shudder as the story unfolds.
