A Good Place to Die Credit: Courtesy
(Self-released, digital)
Amid the minor-key, Americana-tinged desolation of “Valley Green Motel,” the wounded heart at the center of the latest Deep River Saints record is revealed. “The Thunderbird won’t start in the cold / no radio and it smells a bit like mold,” Burlington vocalist and guitarist Patrick Crowley sings. “We drive it up a dirt road and fill it up with smoke / look high and low for another road to roam / and we’ll ask ourselves, would this be a good place to die?”
Released last November, A Good Place to Die is a musical grimoire of the faded magic of the American road, a psychedelic folk and country record imbued with the sort of looming dread that hangs over author Robert W. Chambers’ The King in Yellow. Like that seminal work of early supernatural horror, A Good Place to Die is a collection of somewhat interlocking stories with a sinister undercurrent of tragedy and lost love. Through uneasy tales of dark Western roads, Narcan shots in the back of an ambulance and booze-fueled lamentations of faded love, Deep River Saints chronicle a world in decay.
Crowley, who fronted the California rock band Cities on the Moon before moving to Vermont more than a decade ago, cowrote the record with his childhood friend and longtime collaborator David William Ross, a guitarist and producer who lives in Keene, N.H.
According to Crowley, as he and Ross prepared to record the new album, they recognized a thread of darkness and world-weariness permeating the material. Realizing they had the makings of a sort of soft concept album — or at least a thematically aligned collection of music — the duo pushed the record in a psychedelic direction and treated it as a singular piece, as opposed to just slapping 16 tracks down and calling it an LP.
The result is a sprawling work of gothic Americana. Encompassing everything from the simple beauty of the country breakup tune “Laid Bare” to the tragic Springsteen-ian folk tales of “Mary Jean” and “The Ballad of North Eden,” the album has a charmingly anachronistic feel.
The band, including Kris Yunker on keys, Stefan Amidon on drums, Ty Gibbons on bass and Flynn Cohen on mandolin, creates a suitably apocalyptic sonic milieu for the characters populating A Good Place to Die. Instrumental passages connect the tracks, giving the record the feel of a long, rambling story, perhaps told over late-night beers at a roadside dive.
The danger of making an epic, gothic-folk concept record is that things can get a little repetitious. The acoustic guitars, gentle Hammond organ, shuffling drumbeats and down-on-your-luck lyrics might overwhelm listeners with the urge to drink slowly and stare at empty roads. Fortunately, a handful of rockers keep the pace up, in particular the honky-tonkin’ “Bullshit Mountain.”
As the album nears its end with the instrumental coda “Still the Night,” there’s a wonderful lack of closure. Like so much American folklore, these dark tales have no real finality; the road stretches ever on.
A Good Place to Die is available at deepriversaints.bandcamp.com and major streaming services.
This article appears in April 8 • 2026.
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