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David Rosenbloom & the Outlanders
Title: Mysteries Label: Independent The
Rundown |
One hopes that the music
industry's pundits and publicists have given up the tiresome game of trying to
anoint the next Bob Dylan. For better or worse, the Powers That Be broke the
mold after they made crotchety old Mr. Zimmerman. But David Rosenbloom and
the Outlanders prove that there's plenty of rich territory to be mined in the
reaches of poetic folk-rock. Rosenbloom's traditional melodies and song
forms, unpolished vocals, simple instrumentation (complete with expressive
harmonica) and lo-fi production all make his debt to Dylan obvious. Echoes of
Townes Van Zandt, Neil Young, Leonard Cohen and even Elvis Costello also ring
through the twelve songs on "Mysteries." And speaking of Neil
Young, songs like "Best Believe" and "Man of the Shadows"
feature distorted electric guitars that gallop like Crazy Horse. But most of
all it's his lyrics, with their religious overtones and their unsentimental
examination of the mysterious human ability to punctuate stretches of
inexplicable gloom with flights of spontaneous joy, that place Rosenbloom in
the great tradition of the late 20th century poetic masters of song. "It's
a pleasure, a pleasure to wonder/it's a fine thing to ponder and dwell/but to
enter your own soul and plunder/is a crime that no man can tell," he
writes in "Plunge Not Into the Abyss." But digging deep into the
dark regions of the human condition is a crime this band is clearly not
afraid to commit. "Blood is the proof of God's grace/see the wound
punctured into his side/the world took one look at his face/and felt better
once he had died" is Rosenbloom's subtly distorted take on Christianity's
founding myth, for example. If at times his colorful imagery shades into
purple ("The world's disorder is in full rehearsal/as madness through a
rabid mongrel sings"), it's a small flaw in a fine project that shows
there is a lot of artful noise yet to be fashioned from the sturdy raw
materials of American song. |
