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Johnny
Cash
American
III: Solitary Man
(American
Recordings)
16
Horsepower Secret
South
(Razor
and Tie)
Hank
Williams (Senior, goddammit)
Alone
With His Guitar
(Mercury)
"Sorrow
stands/ Near and close at hand..."
--16
Horsepower
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The first thing I thought--and the notion came with sadness,
a little mortal dread and amazement all mixed together--was
that Johnny Cash isn't sounding like Johnny Cash anymore.
American III: Solitary Man is the latest
album by the devil from the Arkansas dirt farm. It's the
first since the long-self-styled Man in Black narrowly missed
a number of appointments with the real Man in Black
during a succession of hospital stays that followed Unchained,
a '98 effort only slightly less magisterial than '94's American
Recordings. That harrowing 13-song hell-ride, an album
terrible in its immediacy and prophecy, re-established Cash
as the ultimate outlaw icon, a role he's reigned in for
nearly 50 years. Between the spells in the doctors' realm
and the flirtations with the Reaper, though, the decades,
both those lived hard and those lived otherwise, have begun
to tell against Cash. He's old.
In its first brush past, Solitary Man seems more
like a thin coda to Cash's opalescent life's work and especially
the late snap of great records. The first track, an ambling
take on Tom Petty's "I Won't Back Down," is surprising
in its vulnerability; while Cash, in full voice, used to
evoke a midnight-colored plague cloud storming across the
horizon, he sounds here like an old wounded lion who knows
he's down to his last stand. The coiled violence Cash promised
on songs as recent as '94's "Delia's Gone" seems missing,
his well-known timbre run through with hair-line cracks.
A second listen to the album, however, comes pretty damn
close to revelation. Yes, the hate, always just as strong
in Cash's music as love and fear, is mostly gone, replaced
by stronger passions. It sounds bad to say that the album
rings with finality, but it does. If anyone makes a good
bet as a survivor, it's Johnny Cash; still, Solitary
Man burns with the conviction of one who has really
faced death and is steeled for its arrival. Cash is well-known
as a man of faith, and now that the End is way more than
theoretical, that spiritual armor has given him the toughness
his reputation's always claimed.
Sure, he's not quite sounding like the Man in Black of
old, but you know what they say about the more things change.
By the time Solitary Man hits its stride, right about
midway through JC's cover of Will Oldham's "I See
a Darkness," it's clear the album will stand tall in Cash's
legacy. Whether or not he records many more songs, this
record showcases an artist who has reconciled his native
defiance with a calm acceptance of fate. The last two songs,
the oddly ebullient curtain call "I'm Leavin' Now" and the
traditional death ballad "Wayfaring Stranger," send Cash
riding out--from this record, at least--in glory.
"Wayfaring Stranger" rears its mourning-clad head again
on Secret South, the fearsome new album by
16 Horsepower. Many speak of 16 Horsepower with mingled
fear and awe, and it's no wonder. Singer David Eugene
Edwards is a Colorado preacher's son, and the damnation
and hellfire of his old man's sermons course through 16
Horsepower's emphatic, apocalyptic country. At different
points on Secret South, electric guitars wail through
sparse settings like keening women. Edwards sings with eye-rolling
horror cooled by a creepy detachment, as though his tales
of love gone bad and eternal doom don't scare him
too bad.
On Alone with His Guitar, a fresh packaging of some
haunted old solo demos and radio cuts by Hank Williams,
the star of the show manages no such distance. Whether he's
tossing off remorseful country blues or issuing a stern
condemnation of a lover gone astray, Williams is right there,
gnashing through the songs in his uniquely high and lonesome
warble, pouring blood into his strings. For those used to
listening to Williams' studio runs with full-band backing,
this stripped-down exercise of his mastery is a little scary
in its raw power. With no sonic window dressing, Williams
can be almost too much to take. In particular, "Alone and
Forsaken" and "You Caused It All by Telling Lies" are short,
hot salvos of animosity, hotter and a hell of a lot meaner
than any of the angry little men of today's radio. They've
got problems? They should buy this record, and take a damn
number.
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