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MP3 Rodney DeCroo - Mockingbird Bible
13 MP3 Songs in this album (60:14) !
Related styles: FOLK: Folk-Rock, COUNTRY: Alt-Country
People who are interested in Townes Van Zandt John Prine Bruce Springsteen should consider this download.
Details:
Rodney DeCroo''s War Torn Man was a monolithically dark enterprise, lifted out of its pervading sense of despair by a sizzling band caught live and on fire after weeks on the road.
As thrilling as it was to hear the upbeat clash so heroically with the downbeat on that universally acclaimed piece of work, Rodney''s new Mockingbird Bible offers no such protection. It''s a kind of straight-ahead depression session, the like of which draws a certain kind of listener like a suicidal moth to an open flame. It''s quiet, and meditative, with none of the rollicking will to dance on the lip of the abyss we heard from War Torn Man. And ever since that record set a high-water mark for the artist and opened doors all over Canada, US, and Europe for Rodney''s acutely honest vision, his circle of friends and colleagues have watched Mockingbird Bible unfold like a slow-motion demolition.
Like Berlin by Lou Reed, or The Marble Index by Nico, or pretty much anything by Townes Van Zandt, here is a record so exhaustively bleak that you fear for its health, even while the sadness seizes and lifts you.
True to Rodney''s unfailingly poetic sensibilities- which provide such a ringing contrast to the shaggy creature that produces them, he spares us an explicit account of feelings. Reticence at war with honesty; that''s the source of his mojo. And so abstract phrases jump out of the music; "junkies on fire", "shooting stars and battle scars", loneliness compared to the soul of a spider, and the oddly disturbing question, "Is that rain coming down, or is that gasoline?" Lines that pile up and shake us, even if we''re not sure what they mean, exactly.
Rodney''s life is in these random-feeling allusions, and you feel that a more explicit account of the blight they address would be too much to bear. As the record winds to a close, so does Rodney''s voice. In The Captain''s Tower Song, he is wheezing into his hand it seems, asking, against his own nature, and with a clarity that suddenly brings everything into focus, "Oh my mother, oh my father, will we be reconciled...?"
As ever, Rodney''s collaborators are on point for this long, dark, acoustic album of the soul. Ida Nilsen (Great Aunt Ida, Buttless Chaps) and Sam Parton (Be Good Tanyas) hover like angels of mercy, while Jon Wood (Flophouse Jr., Herald Nix) dials in just enough embellishment. A single, authoritative bass note from the piano braces Sacred Ground; electric guitar acts like distant thunder on Gasoline; lap steel brings humidity to Memories of Snow, Memories of Dust; Meredith Bates'' fiddle brings melancholy grace notes to Spinning Wheel; an entire vocabulary of anxiety is conjured up in the simple organ parps and distant kettle drum of Long White Road; the whole of St. Augustine becomes shrouded in its own Carnival of Souls dream-time.
And through it all Rodney opens his wounds for our listening pleasure. And it is a pleasure to be sure, while the implicit message it carries- we ignore these accounts of human desolation at our peril- rings louder and louder, through the suffocating quiet that surrounds us.
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