Gill Landry – Skeleton at the Banquet
Loose – 24 January 2020
Formerly a member of Old Crow Medicine Show, this is the Grammy award-winning singer-songwriter Gill Landry’s fifth solo album and features the rhythm section of Seth Ford-Young and Josh Collazo alongside Stewart Cole on trumpet and violinist Odessa Jorgensen, Landry handling guitar keyboard and pedal steel duties.
Described as “reflections and thoughts on the collective hallucination that is America”, it actually opens with one of the “few love songs for good measure”, I Love You Too (the video premiered here), his deep baritone and the moody slow rumbling tango-like noir pedal steel and reverb guitar arrangement calling to mind Chris Isaak.
The tempo picks up as harmonica introduces The Wolf, another moody Americana number, this time evoking stark Texicali landscapes and thoughts of The Handsome Family on an allegorical lyric about those who come with sweet promises masking sharp teeth as he sings “don’t you know you can’t have what you want if all you ever want is more”. Introducing piano and violin, the slow waltzing A Different Tune continues the political undercurrents, the lyric about a mysterious woman riding a black horse referencing 1975 BJ Thomas hit Another Somebody Done Somebody Wrong Song.
The longest track at just over five minutes, Nobody’s Coming is a musically heady affair with its trumpet and gypsy violin flavours, intoxicating dark samba rhythms and is the first to spark the frequent Cohen comparisons, both vocally and lyrically, as he sings of “millions of people carrying chains, beneath the steeples I heard their claims” and how salvation “is up to us”.
It’s back to a love song of sorts for The Refuge of Your Arms, another moody slow desert waltz with Cole and Jorgensen texturing the simply strummed guitar and resonator solo, albeit here allegorically talking of a loss of faith (“the victims of our own device”) between America and those “thirsty souls in whiskey bars/Blanket stiffs in railway yards/Lifetimes from the nearest star” seeking its protective embrace.
Continuing the theme and conjuring lost, homeless and disconnected souls, it’s back to the Cohen echoes with the circling guitar line of A Place To Call Home (the Chelsea Hotel, perhaps?), Ford-Young on upright bass, with its images of those “squatting in basements they could not afford” and noting how “from the poor house to the jail house the distance ain’t long/From the White House to the court house that can’t hear the songs” of those Washington ghosts out in the streets.
Again featuring harmonica, Angeline is a straight-up folksy Dylanesque dysfunctional relationship waltz (“you’re so unkind to treat me like some kind of whore/Giving you everything while being ignored”) concluding with the kiss-off “I used to get bitter angry and numb/Leave cursing your name in the streets/Now I don’t see how I could be so dumb/To lay all these pearls at your feet”.
The penultimate number, the gypsy violin-led, jogging rhythm Trouble Town, returns to Cohen noir territory with its apocalyptic talk of how “crimson writing stains the walls/Where friend and martyrs came to call”, reflecting that “perhaps some things cannot be learned” as “more than nations will be broken”. It ends with just Landry on Spanish guitar for the Andalusian-flavoured ruminative fingerpicked instrumental Portrait of Astrid (A Nocturne), a haunting finale to a hugely accomplished and at times troubling album that has already earned its place in “Best Of” year-end lists. Enjoy the feast.
Skeleton At The Banquet will be released 24 January 2020 via Loose on LP, CD and digitally.
More here: http://www.gilllandrymusic.com/