Dave Alvin
Ashgrove
Dave Alvin’s obviously been doing
a lot of reminiscing.
His latest studio
effort, “Ashgrove,” released by
Yep Roc Records, is full of looking back and longing: for a
simpler time, for lost friends, lost love, and lost
youth. And as a little bonus, it boasts another one of
his patented narratives from the grave.
Let me start by saying I credit
Dave Alvin with really turning me onto country music in
the first place. His 1986 release, “Romeo’s
Escape,” probably influenced my own current musical
taste more than any other record I can recall.
When I first heard “Every Night About This Time,” it
marked a sea change in my music listening habits.
Sure, as a kid I loved The Byrds
and Gram Parsons and Neil Young, all of whom were
heavily influenced by country music, but when I heard
that mournful baritone voice over that pedal steel
guitar, that detached, sad, and at the same time
opportunistic narrative, well, something clicked. It
wasn’t country rock, it was country straight up,
blatant and unapologetic.
He's come a long
way since that first solo album, forging a roots rock
sound that's really all his own while seamlessly
blending the genres. Ashgrove mixes sizzling blues guitar riffs with
melodic acoustic instrumentation.
The lyrics are almost entirely
about looking back. The title cut is a tribute to the
blues singers of his youth. “Black Haired Girl” is a
direct confrontation with aging - summed up in an
encounter with a disinterested attendant at an all
night selfserve gas station. “Nine Volt Heart”
chronicles his protagonist’s escape to the world he
finds in a transistor radio. In the most
countrified song, “Rio Grande,” he’s chasing down a
runaway lover through the deserts of South Texas.
The tracks that really stand out
to me are:
“Sinful Daughter”- both musically
and lyrically - he gets downright biblical here with
this little ode to a young harlot and those who would
condemn her:
“But let the one who is not
sinful
Yeah, they can throw the stone.”
“Everett Ruess” is a story within
a song that chronicles a free spirited drifter from a
bygone era. The dead man telling the story does
so without the slightest hint of bitterness or
pretension and it comes off as a celebration rather
than a eulogy. The recurring chorus of “They
never found my body, boys, or understood my mind”
drives home the narrator’s lack of concern with the
rest of society. It’s a song anyone who’s ever
felt out of place in the modern world can surely relate
to and, musically, it’s very pretty to boot.
“The Man in the Bed” is the real
stunner here. A downright beautiful melody that
sounds like it could have been written as an homage to
deceased older relative as well as a straight ahead
look at his own mortality, the lyrics convey the
helplessness and frustration of someone lying infirm
and dying in a hospital bed.
With verses like…
“Now the nurse over there
doesn’t know
That I ain’t some helpless old so-and-so
I could have broken her heart not that long ago
Now the nurse over there doesn’t
know.
That the man in the bed isn’t me . . .,”
this one could have easily gone
over the top in false sentimentality, and no doubt
would have had any Nashville songwriter taken a stab at
it. Alvin manages to pull it off with just the
right amount of sincerity and never gets smarmy or
sounds a false note.
That’s pretty much true of the
entire album. The only songs that don’t work
almost perfectly are “Out of Control” - only because it
sounds too much like a rewrite of his previous “One
More Guilty Man” and “Somewhere In Time” which does
manage to redeem itself with the all-too-brief, bluesy
instrumentation at the very end.
It sounds kind of cliché to say so
but Dave Alvin has matured as a songwriter and proves
it with this one.
Like the subject of “Nine Volt
Heart,” you get the idea that when he was growing up,
the radio was indeed his toy. It left me pretty
anxious to hear what he does next.
-jitter
