Folkicide’s songs are the stuff of nightmares

Davey’s Uptown Ramblers Club contains eight people, including longtime owner-bartender Michele Markowitz and me. Burnie Booth, who performs here every first Wednesday of the month as Folkicide, judges this to be a fair-sized crowd. He stands in front of the microphone at the back of the room, striking the strings on his beat-up acoustic guitar like it’s a custom Gibson Les Paul.

These chords make angry, agitated sounds — much like Booth’s voice, which usually backs off enough to settle on a discordant, petulant 1990s drone. He ekes out harsh melodies here and there, but they’re overshadowed by his abrasive delivery. Booth admits that the songs he writes are not for everyone.

“I’ve cleared many a room,” he tells me with a laugh before his set. “No two ways about it. But I’m not shy about scaring away the wrong people.”

“Not shy” is one way to describe Booth. Another is deceptively normal. He’s clad in jeans and a T-shirt, and his easy smile and warm brown eyes give his face a look of perpetual happiness. In conversation, he’s affable. But his lyrics tell a different story.

On Folkicide’s latest album, The Meaningless Glare of Broken Human Beings, Booth conjures up pessimistic, subversive tales that likely wouldn’t be appreciated anywhere but a near-empty dive bar or music torture chamber.

“There’s definitely been a few songs that I’ve written where I’ll go back and they’ll scare me,” Booth says. “Like ‘The Little Death.’ That song still terrifies me. It’s so devoid of all hope.”

Booth isn’t exaggerating. In “The Little Death,” he rasps with a cold and a cryptic edge in his voice: Do it for the children, snap their necks like little twigs/Do it nice and early as the show just begins. Later, on “Taste a Hate Like Mine,” he details with unnerving delicacy the final mission of a suicide bomber: I knew I’d be dismembered soon, but I felt oddly calm as I approached the bus stop.

“I kind of think if too many people like what I’m doing, I’m probably doing something wrong,” Booth says.

Considering his lyrics, he’s probably right.

Then again, Booth has enjoyed a rather industrious career as Folkicide. He has performed mostly solo since 2006. On occasion, like at Saturday’s show at RecordBar, he’s joined by guitarist Marco Pascolini, of the Naughty Pines and Mr. Marco’s V7. Celebrated fiddler Betse Ellis appeared on Meaningless Glare, along with singer-songwriter Mikal Shapiro and ukulele player and organist Jason Beers, along with a host of others. Booth has carved out a small and dedicated following for Folkicide, built largely with well-known local musicians.

“The people that do seem to dig it are just my people,” Booth says, “and that’s all the encouragement that I need, if the people that I respect like it.”

Between songs, the few barflies remaining at Davey’s offer sincere applause and encouragement for Booth. They may be finding something oddly graceful about Booth’s compositions, and they also might not be focusing on the words. The dissonant and antisocial songs reveal a rare creativity. Unlike most artists, Booth doesn’t place a high priority on beauty.

“Folkicide was the idea that you’re just destroying folk music from the ground up, and making something just ugly and horrible, and trying to encapsulate something especially dark,” Booth says. “And I worked at that really, really hard.”

This seems like an odd goal for a musician, I tell him. Booth agrees, amiable still but unconcerned about my conclusions.

“I remember this time I played down at the Brick [in 2012], when Patrick Deveny had this open-mic thing, and he invited me down,” Booth says. “He summed it up best when he said, ‘I think half the room is just completely appalled, and the other half sort of got it.’ That’s all I’m looking for.”