Dean Owens – Sinner’s Shrine
Eel Pie Records/Continental Record Services – 18 February 2022
Last year, Dean Owens released The Desert Trilogy, a collection of EPs recorded with desert noir icons Calexico, each featuring tasters from the album sessions, four of which, the Grant-Lee Phillips collaboration The Hopeless Ghosts included, are now gathered on this full-length album. I don’t propose to revisit the tracks already reviewed (you can read them individually here: Ep1/EP2/EP3), but the other seven kick off with opening number Arizona with its strummed guitar, pedal steel and horns and from whence comes the album title as he sings of a land confined by a border and “a wire around the heart/Of everything that’s sacred”.
There’s mention of a shrine too on Compañera, a world-weary love song (“Give me the strength to carry on/When I fall behind”), slowly etched out on a sparse, steady strum coloured by melancholic mariachi horns, the pace equally funereal for the portentous The Barbed Wire’s Still Weeping with its hollow drum beat, spectral keys and spaghetti Western echoes with its reference to the trail of tears, the imagery of black orchids and the ominous visions evoked by lines like “The dark horses run/Through the night/To never return” and “the darkness of the heart”.
The tempo picks up while the bustling La Lomita heads down the Rio Grande, opening quietly with a chanted “Across the river/Across the wire/Holy water/Hell fire”, and building on Calexico’s swaying Latin rhythm as that afford the harmonies behind Owen’s treated vocals as he speaks of “The sinners and the saints/Shadows on the trail/Border ghosts/All lost souls” and calls out the Trump-originated plan to build a wall between Mexico and the USA, though the sentiment extends to any such repressive border demarcations.
The light is brighter in the final stretch, We Need Us riding a Tex-Mex rhythm with its Farfisa organ, Joey Burns’ guitar work and more horns in its celebration of the land and a call to future generations to stand fast (“This beauty that we see/Should be here long after you and me/Should be here for those who come/Long after us”) and that we need to take “Time to listen, time to speak/Time to find the peace we seek/Time for us, time for us all/Before our time is up” and no longer accept passively (“Long before us there were songs never sung/Long before us there were no words to write”).
It ends with two love songs suffused with hope. First, the horns tinted, Latina-shaded rhythmic desert sway of Summer In Your Eyes (“Don’t look behind you/Don’t look away, don’t look down/Don’t look behind you/Just look at me, so I can see the sun”). Finally, a revisiting of an old Felsons’ song from 1996, originally Shine Like The Road, inspired by an Ansel Adams photograph, and now retitled After The Rain (premiered here), a hope for a better future with a declaration of steadfastness in “Maybe the sun won’t always shine/And maybe the moon won’t always glow/But if there’s one thing that’s guaranteed it’s/ I’ll always be here for you”. Recorded over two years ago, biding the time during the pandemic and lockdown for the right moment to release it, it emerges out of the sand and desert nights with its heart beating and warmth radiating from its musical core, go and make your pilgrimage.
Pre-Order via Bandcamp: https://deanowens.bandcamp.com/
Website: https://www.deanowens.com/