By GRAHAM REID
(Herald rating: * * * * )
It's increasingly clear that Earle is one of the most consistently interesting and provocative American songwriters of the past two decades. He has a grumpy integrity that is rare, and a powerful humanism that allows him to inhabit characters he creates.
He also speaks with compassion for the downtrodden while skewering their oppressors, whether they be landlords, local sheriffs or the whole industrial-military complex.
Musically, Earle's palette is increasingly wide. His last album Sidetracks saw him covering the Chamber Brothers' soul-rock classic Time Has Come Today (with Sheryl Crow), Nirvana's Breed, offering up his own bluegrass and tossing in the reggae standard Johnny Too Bad.
Transcendental Blues of two years back invited comparisons with the Beatles' Revolver as filtered through Texas country rock, and Earle has always expressed great admiration for the Beatles' ability to just get into a studio and do it.
That's what he's been doing, too, and songs - almost uniformly excellent - pour out of this self-described "borderline Marxist", all in an idiom that suits their sentiment whether it be grunge, pop, rock, country, folk or soul.
No surprises then to hear his new album open with a gritty loop tape hip-hop style, the ghost of the Stones' Street Fighting Man/Jumping Jack Flash starting up Amerika v 6.0, or later him in a chillingly beautiful duet with Emmylou Harris on the gorgeous love song I Remember.
Or that for the story of the unemployed Hispanic ending up in jail on What's a Simple Man to Do? he pays homage to the chugging Tex-Mex organ sound of the late Doug Sahm. Go Amanda is Little Feat reconfigured through Earle's country rock smarts.
Stateside post-September 11 most attention has settled on John Walker Blues, his probing, internal monologue/reflection of America and Islam through the eyes and voice of John Walker Lindh, the kid from California who joined the Taleban. It is a terrific song - only the most moronic would consider it unpatriotic - but it has its equals elsewhere.
While there's an apocalyptic feel to the opener Ashes to Ashes and the somewhat paranoid Conspiracy Theory, (JFK again Steve? In 2002?) the gems are in the lovely, understated acoustic country of The Kind, the broody banjo-driven prison ballad The Truth, and that duet with Harris.
The reflective title track at the end offers optimism and resolution despite "death machines rumbling across the land where Jesus stood". The answer is in having faith that "one fine day the children of Abraham will lay down their swords forever in Jerusalem". Anyone who has read William Blake won't take that location quite so literally, although it would be nice to, huh?
Earle here proves again he is in the tradition of the great American dissenters, has the intelligence, voice and conviction to carry it off, and because of the musical diversity and arc of ideas here this is one of the few post-9/11 albums that is both provocative, and has a passionate heart controlled by a guiding intellect.
Oh, and it rocks like a mother in places.
Label: E Squared/Sony
<i>Steve Earle:</i> Jerusalem
By GRAHAM REID
(Herald rating: * * * * )
It's increasingly clear that Earle is one of the most consistently interesting and provocative American songwriters of the past two decades. He has a grumpy integrity that is rare, and a powerful humanism that allows him to inhabit characters he creates.
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