First time round, with "Dogwood Winter", I didn't really get AJ.'s thing; it was all a bit low-key and introspective for my taste.
Well, now I can make up for lost time because "Revelation" has grabbed my attention in a big way. This man grew up with Appalachian folk and gospel music all around him, but flirted with rock and relocated to California before rediscovering his roots and started producing his own music springing directly from those roots."Revelation" opens with "Clinch River Blues", a suicide song in the fine tradition of all those old murder ballads, delivered with a pace and intensity that grips you tight, and you think to yourself that this guy means business.
The guy in the song takes the notion of washing away your sins in the river to an extreme length and the religious imagery returns throughout the album, as does the self-loathing; the song "Chemicals" celebrates the healing power of whisky as it riffs on "The Lord Is My Shepherd": "So whiskey's my shepherd/Oh and I shall not want/It maketh me lay down/ In a strange woman's bed/ It maketh me talk/ Out of both sides of my mouth/ Maketh me feel/ Like I'd be better off dead".
Whereas Dog wood Winter's songs tended to meld together with the similarity of their arrangements, here AJ's assembled some pals to colour in the background, and multitracked his vocals to give some depth to the performance. The big surprise is "Devil May Dance" which owes it's sound far more to Crosby Stills and Nash than to Appalachia, and is quite sumptious. Otherwise AJ's gift to us is to bring us elements of that mountain gospel music and the famed "high lonesome sound" without ever getting po facedly "authentic" about it; for a tradition to live and breathe it needs writers and performers who are prepared to innovate from within the tradition.
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The most impressive thing with this collection of songs is the immense care taken over the writing; he uses pretty strict rhyming schemes with his lyrics but the rhymes never seem to obstruct the flow of his story, but rather give it a rhythm that he emphasises with his singing.
The words play tag with each other, too; a word will be re-used in a new context in successive phrases so that the listener's brain has got the rhythm of the rhyme as well as the rhythm of the repeated word to engage with. Clever, well-worked stuff that rewards close attention and many hearings.
"Revelation" is the closing song, and is a storming sermon on the subject of the day of judgement, when "every man is judged/ by what he's really worth". You don't have to share the creed to be impressed by the ferocity of the message, with the whole band going full tilt. Fantastic stuff, and well worth the three year wait. AJ's playing around Britain this October and November with Nels Andrews; can't wait, myself.
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