Cory Hanson is back with his fourth solo album I Love People that uses the same line up as on Vertigo his last album with his band Wand, that is Evan Burrows, Evan Backer and Robbie Cody along with Heather Lockie, Emily Elkin, Erik KM Clark, Max Whipple, Nicole McCabe, Alex Wasily, Ryan Parrish and Tyler Nuffer.
The album opens with Bird On A Swing that jangles into view with gospel inflected backing vocals and Cory's upbeat vocals making clear how much he enjoys being a Bird On a Swing, despite all the thousands of hours he's worked on graveyard shifts on behalf of the empire of greedy bosses, this gently worms its way into your mind with a calm stately grace.
Joker would have it that his album is a retort to the Anti-Nowhere Leagues I Hate People, Cory is the obverse flip of Animal in everything he does, unlike the Joker at the centre of this song, who just wants to run away from the dead end town he's stuck in, he needs to hit the trail, chased along by the sonorous strings. The punchline is delivered by a very mid 70's sax solo.
I Love People is brass led love note to all the wonderful ways that Cory loves other people, no matter what they might do, or how animalistic they sometimes are, he sounds like he wants to live his life like some latter day Princess Diana ministering to the terminally ill, as readily as he wants to hang out with undefeated fighters and generous friends who always pay his bills for him.
I Don't Believe You is always good advice in the world we live in, no matter how the hushed beauty of this epistle makes clear what brought Cory to this conclusion.
Santa Claus Is Coming Back To Town is for a soldier returning from Afghanistan hoping to re-connect to the real world, on this slow elegiac Christmas tune for the down at heart and sad, hoping to find a way to shake all the Desert Storm flashbacks in his mind, the piano slowly tinkles its way round the violins.
Lou Reed pays tribute by sounding nothing like Lou Reed, this slow piano and strings tune praises the Tai Chi master and his oeuvre, in praise of Lou's New York and a sax solo in the style of Ronnie Ross rather than Marty Fogel.
Final Frontier sounds all hushed beauty and close harmony gospel backing vocals, while the lyrics are full of horrific biblical imagery of torture and despair. Texas Weather is on Cory's mind like English Weather was on Pete Astor's mind, this feels like a cool counterpoint to that legendary tune, it has good imagery of the things you see while adventuring through Texas in search of that panhandle once more.
Bad Miracles we can all think of a few of these, this is slow carefully wrought thoughts on all those miraculous happenings you wished never happened at all. The guitar freak-out when it arrives is nicely at odds with the rest of the album and also the song it breaks out from.
Old Policeman sounds like a lullaby for a retiring copper, that thankfully doesn't involve any bagpipes, instead he wants to lay down his gun and baton and not have to deal with any of the PTSD he is suffering from after years on the force.
The album closes with On The Rocks a country twanging rocker for someone who ended up drinking with the KKK and other surreal adventures on the road to perdition and back, a journey with some delightful slide guitar, helping the medicine go down, he knows who he is afraid of and he may have lost the plot, while threatening to set his hotel room on fire, this is cool despair.
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