Ian Noe – Between The Country
Thirty Tigers – Out Now
“I‘ve been in this junk town most of my life”, sings Ian Noe on Junk Town and, whether or not he’s referring to his own small-town Eastern Kentucky upbringing in Beattyville, Lee County, one of America’s poorest counties, the sentiments (“I wish I was leaving to find another fate/And all the while knowing where I’ll die”) will be all too familiar to anyone stuck in a similar rut.
At times recalling John Prine in his nasal tones, Between the Country is Noe’s debut album but you can hear his years of experience behind it, both lived and in the observations of others struggling to make it through.
Produced by and featuring Dave Cobb on guitars, it opens with the echoey vocal Prine-like barroom strum Irene (Ravin’ Bomb), a portrait of a hellraiser “lit on smoke and beer”, leaning on rock gut wine and M.A.S.H. reruns to get through a life where “you need a half a pint to keep you sane.”
From one female protagonist to another, Barbara’s Song, however, brings paradoxically sparkling and jangling guitar chords to the tale of a 1904 Colorado train wreck, the bridge washed out sending everyone, the driver in whose voice it’s sung, plunging to their deaths. A similar last farewell forms the narrative of the simply strummed country jog Letter To Madeline, as a bank robber is cornered up in the hills by some Detroit mafia boss and his men, wishing he’d mailed his lover’s letter while he had the chance.
Again adding echo to the vocals, Loving You conjures old school country ballads in a song about the ache of loving and waiting for someone who only pays fleeting visits, shifting to bluesier but still Prine picking influences for That Kind of Life in which, unlike Junk Town, the narrator finds a kind of comfort in the overgrown horse weeds “as high as the barn that’s been sitting there waiting to rot ever since old Sam laid the chequebook down and bought out the ‘baccer plot”, even though there’s no place for the old school mechanic and a friend spends half his time “staring down at the pine and the other tripping into walls.” It’s resignation as a refuge from hopelessness.
Opening the sound of babbling water, Dead On The River (Rolling Down) is a particularly sombre number about murder (Mary, a prostitute perhaps, found “gutted like some varmint… with a tangled rope around her”), the Feds out investigating two more washed-up bodies, the lyrics hinting perhaps at the culpability of the narrator who needs “ a flood to wash my sins away.”
Things get pretty rough on Meth Head, a spare, bluesy snapshot of zombie-like junkies who lurk by the moon, out on the prowl that pulls no punches in its description of “ girl tall and thin scabbed yellow skin ‘side a rest-stop… digging at a rash trying to deal for some cash.” And yet, in all this, he finds a determination to survive as the gently fingerpicked waltzing Prine-sway of If Today Doesn’t Do Me In has him singing of a hitcher chasing a dream, a girl working the gas station and how “There’s a feeling you get, not far from despair, that sometimes sets in on your mind. But if it’s all that you’ve got you still set the clock and get up with a reason to climb.”
Even so, it ends back in the darkness with the title track, beginning with a farmhouse being burned to the ground and recounting another tale of murder, payback for those “who’d sang out the worst” and lives ended unprepared, the refrain acknowledging that out in the Appalachia backwoods, “where the deer lay ‘long the road”, “a long life is a blessed one I’m told.”
Noe tells compelling stories set to simple but infectiously memorable melodies, and while he may not have lived what he sings, you sense he knows many that have. As noted, he cites John Prine as his biggest influence; this can stand shoulder to shoulder with his fellow Kentuckian’s self-titled debut.