Bob Drake (musician) - Solo Albums

Solo Albums

Drake recorded six solo albums between 1994 and 2005. Musician and writer Dominique Leone at Pitchfork Media described them as "idiosyncratic to a fault", with songs unlike anything else he has heard. Drake plays almost all the instruments himself, and the music has elements of progressive rock, country/blues and "bizarro pop".

Drake said that his first album, What Day is It? (1994) was influenced by "the climate, the deserts, the dusty hills around L.A.", and that his next one, Little Black Train (1998), largely an instrumental album, was "dirtier and messier" than the first. Medallion Animal Carpet (1999) consisted of different musical ideas strung together around a "medley of noisy country-ish songs", and The Skull Mailbox and Other Horrors (2001), recorded in a barn, was a collection of little "horror songs" played on a nylon stringed classical guitar and a "cheap little organ".

Leone described Skull Mailbox as a "folk-horror-avant-semi-classical hybrid", and a "mix of psychological stress, garage-symphony grandeur and folk-ish retelling of very familiar horror stories". He also described The Shunned Country (2005) as a "rural horror story", saying that the 40-minute album contains 52 brief tracks that "employ as tight a form into the most compact space as possible". Banjos feature prominently that sound like "macabre-sentimental fanfares, Deliverance in the hands of Hitchcock".