Reviewed by Graham Reid
JOHN PRINE
In Spite of Ourselves
(Cowboy)
***
Missing in inaction for too long, singer-songwriter Prine returns with an album of all duets — save for the final track — with the likes of Iris DeMent, Lucinda Williams, Emmylou Harris, Dolores Keane and his wife Fiona.
Inevitably it's a mixed bag, and
opening with the DeMent track is courageous. Her nasal, paint-stripper voice is very much an acquired taste. She gets three other showings among the 16 tracks, although the hilarious, sole original from Prine, In Spite of Ourselves, is well worth hearing.
But better comes in the pairing with Connie Smith on the Everly's So Sad, the Lucinda track (a lost-love weepy medley of Wedding Bells/Let's Turn Back the Years), with Harris and on the odd juxtaposition with Keane where both march to a different drummer in the choruses of Cheating Situation.
And 'Til A Tear Becomes a Rose, with Mrs Prine, whets the appetite for her solo outing.
Nice to hear Prine's vowel-dragging, often wryly dispassionate voice again, but sometimes here the context ill-serves him. And it would be nice to have had more of his own, dryly humorous songs.
