Ben De La Cour – Shadow Land
Fsak – Out Now
After leaving rehab, singer-songwriter de la Cour found himself the recipient of a grant from Manitoba Film and Music to cover the recording costs of this, his fourth album. It was a wise investment.
Recorded in Scott Nolan’s Winnipeg studio, but channelling an East Nashville sound and recruiting a solid set of musicians, Nolan included, it shifts its musical pallette from driving rock n roll with snarly electric guitar to reflective fingerpicking as he unfolds a parade of shifty characters and stories.
Case in point is album opener God’s Only Son, a twangy guitar and rolling percussion rhythm tale of a delusional drifter with a messiah complex who declares “I first heard the word of God/When I was eight years old/He told me to take a carving knife/And hold it to my brother’s throat”, teaming up with a self-described but “pretty white” full-blood Cree to rob a bank, working on the basis that “knowing what you’re doing/Brings the worst kind of luck”. Except, he hears God’s voice again and ends up shooting his partner, going on the run to Mexico with “Johnny folded there in the backseat/Like a blood-soaked dollar bill”. God and the Devil, it seems, like to play games to see who blinks first.
Keeping a Southern gothic mood going, High Heels Down The Holler is a sparse, gnarly, dragged feet blues about the mentally disturbed Billy, beaten by his mother as a boy, a girl dispensing Friday night favours down some shack; it burns down, she disappears and, fishing in the creek, the preacher’s son “caught a pair of red/Size thirteen high heels”.
As mentioned, de la Cour spent sometime in rehab and, evocative of a dustier Townes Van Zandt, the simply strummed The Last Chance Farm recounts his first day there, meeting a woman called Jerry carrying a funeral wreath (“I mentioned how I’d heard it said that we’re all slowly dying/She said I’m just holding this for a friend of mine”), quickly delivering an emotional body blow in the lines “I swear to god I’d give my first born for one lousy beer/Jerry said you wouldn’t talk like that if they’d took yours away/How the hell do you think I wound up in this place?”
It’s a striking example of his ability to craft a compelling narrative with a novelist’s skill in just a few lines and pin it with a haunting chorus too.
Cranking it back up, borrowing from a familiar store sign, In God We Trust (All Others Pay Cash) rides a slide-greased bluesy groove in a scathing attack on a world where “They’re putting candles on dog-shit and calling it cake” and “The first shall be first, the last shall be last” and the sign saying “Prayer is our only hope” is left “Tweaking like a tin can in a bicycle spoke”. Perhaps it’s no coincidence that, after mentioning prayer, it’s followed by the delicate fingerpicked Amazing Grace (Slight Return) where, in its delivery and assembly of small observed details (“The old man throws on yesterdays clothes/Blows black and mild smoke through a busted nose”) thoughts turn to the best work of Kris Kristofferson and Guy Clarke as he sketches a snapshot of a girl waiting for her show off jerk of a boyfriend driving “a lime green Duster white stripes on the side/And a red bumper sticker reading Rebel Pride”, a narrative that ends in a supposed suicide (“A bullet through the head is just a cry for help”) while the girl still hangs out down the bar and the old man “keeps his mouth shut and she does as well”.
The title track moves to a shuffle beat and chiming guitar lines for a slightly Jackson Browne-shaded number where the music is far more upbeat than lyric (“It’s an empty world/Getting emptier every day”) that shifts from a post-break up funk to a commentary on a world gone to hell (“They’re lining the poets and the truck stop queens/Up against the factory wall/I bet you never thought that things/Would get so out of hand”) where “God’s hiding in the bushes/The bushes are on fire/We’re all waiting for him to show”.
As any musician who makes a living on the road knows, you often get to play some pretty shitty dives and The Basin Lounge, a “beer-soaked coffin” down in New Orleans, certainly seems one that lodged in de la Cour’s memory as, to a throaty guitar, piano pumping rock n roller like Jerry Lee and Elvis snorting cocaine he recalls “Blood on the ashtrays sweat on the ground..The green room’s brown, it smells like puke/There’s a poster on the wall “Vote David Duke”. It’s probably not a testimonial.
Over half way in and the nuggets keep coming with Swan Dive (River of Sorrow), an acoustic strummed number about witnessing a suicide (“Joey bounced like a brick from the fourteenth floor window/I watched him go silently all the way down/An angel in free-fall wearing a hospital gown”), again packed with novelist eye details (“The coroner watches the cops laugh at all their own jokes/In a bar ‘cross the street Sinatra is singing/About sitting on rainbows and the world on a string”), the song a desolate reflection on how we’re all “so close to the edge” as he thinks back on a lost love, resigned to a world where “The jukebox is broken and I’m at the bar drinking beer” and how “You can try to go home but you never will find your way back”.
Indeed, battling life’s turbulence (“it’s hard to hold a candle in a wind so wild and strong”) is a running thread and it surfaces again on the cello-accompanied From Now On, where life after break-up is one where “the bars have all shut down/The hounds have gone to howlin’/The moon has long skipped town” and “Time drags like an anchor/Through the dark into the dawn”.
I alluded to Guy Clarke influences earlier and these mingle with John Prine for Anderson’s Small Ritual, an affectionate memory of some family black sheep eccentric, whose fix was Peach Schnapps and who was found dead at home “His face was white as snow/In a big blonde wig/Dolly Parton on the radio”. It’s packed with such words of wisdom as “You can wish in one hand and shit in the other”, “Never trust any man/If he don’t have no scars” and “Don’t let the bottle empty/Don’t let it overflow”, ending on a lovely grace note you have to discover for yourself.
It ends at its most scouring. The penultimate Harmless Indian Medicine Blues is a raw, stripped back distorted slide howl gothic nightmare (“I woke up screaming from an opium dream/Skeletons were riding in limousines…Bodies were burning in a city on fire/Seven shrikes perched on a razor wire”) with “Vampires of the Confederate dead…crawling like shadows all around my bed” and where a line about flies laying eggs inside your head is probably incentive enough to check anyone into rehab.
And so, finally, there’s the magnificently dark, fingerpicked Nick Cave colours of Valley of the Moon that references both Jack London’s John Barleycorn novel and the concept of white logic, a psychotic state of alcohol-induced wisdom whereby you see the face of death (“the noseless one”) rather than the lies drink tells you and the Chinese philosopher’s Chuang Tzu’s musing on whether he is a man dreaming of being a butterfly or a butterfly dreaming of being a man dreaming of being a butterfly. The nihilistic self-loathing closing line about how “man’s a monkey on his dunghill” a nod to the ancient Greek assertion that (as also mentioned in Joseph Andrews) is from where we came. Thankfully de la Cour emerged clean and sober, his writing strengthened by his journey, but while a little light at the end of the album’s tunnel might have been welcomed, there’s darkness here you will want to immerse yourself in.
Photo Credit: Neilson Hubbard