As far as this review goes, my objectivity is a hopelessly ruined thing. The Beaten Sea have played shows in my apartment (three times) on a plywood stage I built with my own girlishly small hands. And I wish I could say the musical connection happened before the interpersonal, but it didn’t.

The first time Benj Pocta, then a good friend, invited me to one of his young band’s shows, I searched my brain for a workable excuse not to go. Friends’ bands’ shows are normally pitiable events that later obligate your disingenuous praise. To my glad surprise, I discovered that Dallas’ The Beaten Sea, comprised primarily of Jamie Wilson and Benj Pocta, were legitimate and prolific musical alchemists, fashioning precious metals from simple, wooden melodies. That first show turned me from friend to the sort of groupie who browses Home Depot for stage material.

The majority of Beaten Sea’s growing audience first made the band’s acquaintance in any one of a now countless number of stripped-down house shows – scrunched up in narrow living rooms, their attentive brows hovering near the band’s knees, microphones thrown to the curb. The Beaten Sea are unofficial members of an unofficial cooperative known as The Dallas Family Band, listing among its disciples The Fox and The Bird, Jacob Metcalf, lalagray, and a number of variations I can never keep straight.

A dogged do-it-yourself community, The Dallas Family Band is a collective of day-jobbers who turn gypsy at night, frequently swapping band members, willing to play in any house with an open door for music’s sake alone. In a city worn to boredom from the alternative glut of the mid ’90s, it is fitting that musical authenticity in Dallas would find purpose again roaming from house to house like a hobbled ghost. The Beaten Sea know that they’re privileged to be part of this new undertaking, lugging that old spirit around in a banjo case in a city over which looms the forgotten specters of Robert Johnson and Blind Lemon Jefferson.

The bearded, booted Beaten Sea are a country band. They have several years of music-making ahead of them and several dozen writers to encumber them with unnecessary adjectives, but for now “country” is apt enough. Country is a true, American art that Nashville drugged and violated and lobotomized until it danced voodoo-like in a designer tank-top. “The best country songs,” Jamie Wilson asserts, “were written by those who had lost the country.” That’s what The Beaten Sea achieves on this album — getting back to the search for a purity that, as Wilson sings, “just ain’t pure no more.” The Beaten Sea are not the first or only band to go mining for country dust beneath all those Dallas parking lots. They’re just the best to do it lately.

I won’t hear that The Beaten Sea don’t believe in actual ghosts. Their self-titled debut album would convince the most rational skeptic. They believe in ghosts of dead loves, prophetic crickets, and humming sirens. The Beaten Sea believe in the flames of damnation that people run alternatingly to and from. The characters in their songs tiptoe through a shaky world held together by a whispery grace that most often touches us with the business end of an axe. The Beaten Sea know that skin is for touching, trees are for chopping down, fingers for chopping off, man made for toil, fists made for beating away nightmares. It all happens within the sounds and words of the ordinary, made alive with the supernatural, like a chorus of mystic clodhoppers.

The writer Harry Crews once posited that the simplest Southern conversation is theological. Dallas is not the South and none of the members of the Beaten Sea are from Georgia, but their music wears the same habit. Whether they are reciting Apocalypse or channeling Dostoevsky’s dialogue with the Devil, The Beaten Sea’s songs sweat with God-talk, wrapped in the timeworn melodies of American music at its purest.