Press & Reviews

Frontman with Uncle Buckle, this is Brown's third album and, accompanied by friends old and new on guitars, bass, drums, keys, banjo and pedal steel, one that brings some interesting whimsy and colours to the basic Americana template. As such it opens with 'Scratch', channelling a Talking Heads disco beat on a song that's actually anything to do with an itch but about revealing the numbers on a lottery ticket ('Where do you scratch, I scratch by the register/where do you scratch, I like to scratch on the steering wheel of my car …where do you scratch, I like to wait till I get home'), though in his case never coming up lucky ('I'm the one who could never win the lottery').

'Davenport', as all furniture buffs will know, is a couch large enough to lie down upon. The song, however, with its gravelly vocals and bubbling banjo backing, is a bluesy number about the Mason-Dixon line that, using the back yard as a location, separates the two different worlds of the north and the south ('now up here in the northeast we have a different set of rules for what you might leave laying out in the yard and what our friends down south might choose/now nobody is going to say a thing and nobody's going to mind if you've got a snow machine carcass busted snowplow even a target deer is fine… but a davenport looks best in the yard below the Mason Dixon line').

A pedal-steel flavoured honky tonk cabaret waltzer, 'Inertia' is about what it says on the label ('when the inertia sets in, its hard just the breathing I can't play or sing, I'm all broken strings/the ten thousand things are piled right there on my counter/The weight of the day won't go away, if there is light somewhere it's just in the way/I try hard to stand an invisible hand is holding me down right here where I lay'). Which leads to the title track, not the Ted Hawkins or Housemartins hit but a scuttling along number with yelping inspired by a conversation about bathrobes and who wore them married to a story about someone's mother living in a compound in rural Ohio, imaging her smoking in the driveway and ending up in another song about lives in stasis ('There was this girl she had her way with me/stole my guitar picks stole my heart/turns out she's the one that had the remedy and she already had a dog/I told her that she need not be lonely that lonesome was a bullshit place to be/I told her that I knew about this better place while lonesome crawled all over me … Mom's lighting up another cigarette and Dad has disappeared beneath the car/it's six and Ma ain't out of her bathrobe yet and it looks like we're staying where we are/and we're missing happy hour at the bar goddamn the solenoid on that car').

Set to a Kristofferson chug, 'Long Time' is about meeting up with old friends and sharing old times and experiences, switching to a Latin rhythmic sway for 'Gasoline Hands' which opens with the line 'everybody that I know they've got one thing that they won't let show and it's not because they like to hide it's like honesty was suicide' and would seem to be how dirty little secrets can screw you up ('Bill lost his will Wayne went insane Warren turned his life around and he did it with cocaine') and how you can never really wash the smell away, nicely encapsulated in Katie Mullins singing the catchy refrain 'get your gasoline hands off of me'.

Then, Mullins on harmonies, the strummed folksy 'Broken Glass' is in the tried and tested tradition of accepting love as it comes ('The bed and table the tippy little chair they're all washed in moonlight it tumbles down the stairs/the stars are frozen bits of broken glass scattered pieces of what couldn't last/She's passed out in the car now but waking up soon and if the sun can't get her up I know what to do… I found her blankets I found her hand and I found that loves just love it's not to understand').

Metaphorically inspired by the solvent often used in fibreglass work, so volatile you can almost watch it evaporate, 'Acetone' is another off the wall love song with a sad undercurrent ('She seemed fine at first but when we left her all alone/she disappeared like acetone into the very air I breath') while anchored by jazzy Tom Waits double bass and skittering drum, 'Deer Cut and Wrapped' is probably the only song you'll ever hear about cutting up deer for freezing, the title coming from a sign stencilled on a van.

A waltzer, this one with accordion, 'Napanoch' is named for a small town where the Catskill mountains and the Shawangunk mountains nearly meet, once busy but fallen into decline after the railroad disappeared, the song about being metaphorically shipwrecked, ('there's not a thing for me, my shoes and hopes washed out to sea/I'm just getting by on the memories of the place that I used to call home'), feeling homesick and needing to go to a place to feel whole again ('I've got to get back to the things I miss/ old 209 and the cars on it and the white Shawangunk conglomerate/ it's then that I'll know I'm back home/I'd trade this place and everything here that I got if it could just could just get me back to Napanoch'). Trivia fans might like to know that Shawangunk is a town in southwestern Ulster County, New York that takes its name from its largest stream, the Shawangunk Kill, and Vernooy Kill is a falls area near New York, kill being an abbreviation of killitje, the Dutch word for creek.

Sounding like John Prine filtered through a Johnny Cash lens, the scurrying drums and pedal steel upbeat, 'God Bless Me Jesus' is a vignette about a young woman, a young man and a dog that's blind in one eye and basically both a whimsical and heartfelt benediction ('God bless her Jesus won't you God bless her Elvis God bless young women who don't distress us/God bless the people who die in their beds, the way you hang up the phone when the line goes dead'.

Another waltzer, this with more of an Eastern European feel and accordion, 'The Ridge' refers to Pendleton county in the northeastern panhandle West Virginia with its ancient, steep mountains and, inspired by finding barbed wire, the jawbone of a sheep and a fossilized dinosaur on one of the ridges, is about the process of time. Sounding like it might have been written by Ewan MacColl, 'PCP' is a 51 second song recalls the first kiss of a girl he's not seen or heard from in 45 years, the album ending with 'The Unanswered Prayer', a slow Prine-like swayer inspired by seeking woman in a car focused on pulling out into the traffic and thinking how happy and lucky she must be only for her to subsequently fall apart in tears, sobbing with her head on the steering wheel, a reminder that people's lives are not always as perfect as they might appear. Raise a glass, this is a happy hour well spent.

Mike Davies