The voice within

NEW ENGLAND DREAMING Though based in Brooklyn, Joel Thibodeau retains the gothic sensibility of his homeland, Maine.

Photo: Lisa Carson

Joel Thibodeau, the musician known as Death Vessel, lives in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, just down the block from the Stobierski Lucas Gardenview Funeral Home. In the stairwell of his apartment, tenants have posted hostile notes instructing people how to walk on the stairs (quietly) due to the building’s foundation (shaky). Upon pressing the wrong buzzer, a visiting journalist is greeted by a belligerent man in pajama bottoms. “Joel lives upstairs!” he barks, before his frown gives way to the slamming door.

Accordingly, it is with some trepidation that one enters the old railroad apartment where Thibodeau dreams up gothic folk-rock tales of bandits and ghouls. Waiting inside is the ghastly artist himself—gracious, soft-spoken and, at the moment, baking a loaf of gingerbread while his dog, Rummy, plays with a squeaky toy.

What’s perhaps more surprising, however, is that Thibodeau is a Joel, and not a Jane: Even upon close inspection, the angelic and somewhat chilling falsetto on Death Vessel’s debut album, Stay Close, seems to emanate from a pig-tailed girl of nine—not a side-burned man of 30. Released last March on North East Indie soon after Thibodeau moved here from Providence, the record is belatedly making its way to downtown stereos, particularly as the singer finds work opening for bands such as Low (this week) and the Books (next month). “His music is absolutely gorgeous and quite dark,” says Calexico’s Joey Burns, whose December tour with Iron and Wine featured an opening set by Death Vessel. “And that voice is…well, it’s unique.”

Thibodeau is hardly the world’s first androgynously voiced singer, nor the first to sound like he’s hiding a child somewhere in his larynx. But whereas artists like Michael Jackson or Antony impart flamboyant images to correspond with their performances, the man behind Death Vessel insists that his vocal style is incidental. “For some reason, as I started to pay close attention to singing, I kept increasing my octave,” he says, in a pitch far removed from the one in his songs. “It was just the voice I wanted to hear. People get tripped up over gender, but there are many ways to affect your voice when you’re singing. During grunge, it sounded like a lot of singers had marbles in their mouths—and that certainly wasn’t the way they spoke.”

Both in concert (where a lone Thibodeau accompanies himself on acoustic guitar) and on Stay Close (where he is joined by a band that includes the electric guitar and samples of Erik Carlson), it’s this crystalline voice that etches itself into a listener’s consciousness. It was first heard in String Builder, a duo that paired the singer with his older brother Alec, a Providence-based visual artist. Death Vessel came to life as a result of Alec’s own success: When his art-based currency system, Noney (which features a series of hand-drawn bartering bills), began occupying more and more of his time, the younger Thibodeau was forced to strike out on his own in 2003.

Even as Thibodeau is stationed in Brooklyn, it’s his roots in Maine that continue to dominate Death Vessel, whose brand of Americana descends from the lore of old New England. Thibodeau came of age living down the road from a house haunted by spooks: the Kennebunkport estate of George Bush. “My sister would be jogging and someone on an intercom would tell her to stop,” Thibodeau says. “Then his motorcade would go by with guns pointing out the window.”

Mercifully, the singer has drawn inspiration from other Maine figures, including an eccentric elementary-school teacher who wrote macabre children’s songs for his class to perform. One Death Vessel number, “Mandan Dink,” imagines the teacher—recently deceased, naturally—meeting a spirit from one of his own compositions.

To hear Thibodeau explain it, his home state’s persistent taste for morbid art stems from the devil’s favored tool: idle hands. “The tourists coming to visit Maine are there to buy lobster coffee mugs and funny tank tops,” he says. “If you live there, those obviously aren’t very interesting, and you find other things to keep yourself occupied. In my town, a lot of people ended up writing original music.” The singer opens his oven and tends to his gingerbread; his dog barks. Somewhere, a little girl’s ghost awaits a Death Vessel song through which to be heard.

Death Vessel plays Southpaw Friday 3 and Bowery Ballroom Monday 6.