The seemingly hopeful exhortation for Charley to ‘cheer up’ in the album’s opening song is surely as empty as a recession-closed mini-mall car park? Is it remotely possible that this sad man has never heard the full story before?
Don’t believe it Charley; don’t imagine reality is ever
other than narrated as it is.
Ill fortune and fortuity are far too persuasive in this real
world for false hopes. No matter how good and positive things might have been,
the bad cousin will visit and spoil it all, as in Imperial Apartment 315, a
habitation for everyperson.
Sonny knew this. Sonny just disappeared. What is the point?
How can there be a way out when a scene of sudden dislocation is accompanied by
A woman carrying a
baby walks by
Next to me there’s
an old couple
Whose car won’t
start
And the snow keeps
drifting down
In these opening three songs – Cheer Up Charley, The Imperial, Where Are You Sonny? – the horns of Cory Gray and Kelly Pratt fill
the plaintive role normally supplied by pedal steel, though that is sure to
come. This is exemplified further in the blues of fourth Let’s Be Us Again with its repeated yearning for a return to better
times that cannot possibly be retrieved, despite the dreaming.
And once more, as with most Vlautin songs, this thematic
certainty is reinforced in Roll Back My
Life with such a melodic beauty that as listeners we somehow manage to keep
our heads just above annihilation, the lyrics as spare and yet complete as
always,
Roll back my life
Past all those years
Of just scraping by
And pour me a drink
Turn down the lights
And roll back my
life
Roll back my life
So I can see where
not to stall
I can see how not to
fall
For those who I did
fall
Roll back my life
In Eddie and Polly
there is musical irony in its early 60s echo, a hint of the upbeat with the
jingle of bells and a repeat chorus of can’t
you see?, but in a storytelling that ends with such potent imagery as this is how the hurt become maimed we
are in familiar territory, that pedal steel here now, it too ironic in
ostensibly eschewing the lamentation.
It is wonderful to hear Amy Boone gracing the dark with her
light, a vocal that speaks to the truth of each song’s narrative, not spoken
but there are no lavish runs, and this clear-as-truly-felt delivery adds an
authentic stoicism as well as tender understanding. Wonderful too that she has
returned to performance from injuries sustained in a car accident.
One of the most dramatic of songs, musically speaking with
its crescendo of determination, is That
Old Haunted Place, a tale of failure and blame and the recurring theme of
trying to move on from the inevitable, here a decision-making from someone who left home at sixteen who might just make it, away that is but likely not from the unavoidable
to come.
Penultimate He Don’t
Burn for Me is painfully simple and true, a soulful song of regret at the
loss of love painted in the description of ordinary and everyday heartbreak.
And oh those horns, swaying together in the melodic line to just about hold us
all from falling, a final burst as the song finishes to massage as much as is
humanly possible.
Closer Waiting on the
Blue is the poetry of late night inevitability, the slow sad keyboard of Gray
wrapped tight with Boon’s beautiful weariness, the horns like distant sirens
called out to the painfulness.
Another memorable album from Vlautin, Boone and fine band. Available
right now here [and you can listen too].
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