Open Season

Cowboy Junkies embrace the dark

By Ted Drozdowski

Cowboy Junkies play, with Sarah Harmer, at the State Theatre, June 14, at 7:30 p.m. Call (207) 775-3331.

Family: in more ways than one, blood ties inform the new Cowboy Junkies album.

There are plenty of songs about murder, spiritual con ict, and lives spiraling hopelessly out of control. But until now none of them had been recorded by Cowboy Junkies. The Canadian band, who play the State Theatre next Thursday, are better known for the gentility of their rootsy, psychedelic music; for the marriage of acoustic and electric instruments that typically support the soft, breathy voice of Margo Timmons. It’s a sound that won them acclaim in 1988 for their self-made The Trinity Sessions (RCA), a soft-focus, no-frills album recorded live in a church for $250. That disc’s gauzy version of Lou Reed’s “Sweet Jane” ignited their career, which heated up again when Oliver Stone used the performance in his daring lm Natural Born Killers.

The Junkies’ new Opený(Zoë/Rounder) is a startling departure that could be the soundtrack to a sequel to Stone’s movie. The album brims with mayhem, not just in the blood-spattered lyrics but in the twisted, psychedelic attack of its guitars and even the electric mandolins. Most songs on Open examine how emotions and ideas can chip away at the fragile composition of one’s humanity until they become all-consuming obsessions that make something — a mind, a heart, a soul — snap or nearly snap.

When Open begins with a series of killings and a suicide in “I Did It All for You,” it’s as if the dark undercurrents that ran through the band’s six previous albums had come rushing to the surface. Cowboy Junkies’ best songs, like the Doors-evoking title track from 1995’s Lay It Down, with its introverted guitar solos and words about small building blocks of deception, have always probed the interior workings of people, but with a sense of warm detachment. This time these examinations have the messy, direct involvement of an autopsy.

As Open wends through sweet-voiced contemplations on death and Judgment Day, Biblical considerations of guilt and the weight that sin and faithlessness attach to transcendence, the swirl of portent and melodrama is heightened by the band’s most extravagant playing. Their live sound blends the spare poetry of Appalachian folk music with the big-guitar extrapolations of Neil Young & Crazy Horse. Here that anxious, hardy rock approach to improvising has been channeled into the studio. Guitarist and main songwriter Michael Timmons, Margo’s brother, summons up crashing waves of feedback, squawking lashes of wah-wah, and expressionist splashes of phase shifter that make for erratic but trans xing cracks in the band’s trademark studio sound. Nonetheless, Margo’s hushed, lovely singing stays at the fore.

For Michael, Open could be a sign dangling from his neck. “A lot of these songs re ect the issues I was dealing with when I wrote them. I had turned 40 and I was overwhelmed by so much. I had had my second child, had moved into a new house, the band was changing its management and label, and my grandparents had died. The songs are literally the result of me re-examining my life, coming to grips with the understanding that I am going to die some day. It was the rst time in my life that I really knew what anxiety was, and it felt as if it were coming from everywhere.” So he delivered songs that amounted to a personal exorcism recorded in clusters between tour dates to harness the energy of the Junkies’ dynamic stage approach.

“Thank God we didn’t deliver this album to BMG or Geffen,” Michael says of the band’s previous major labels. “We did the deal and handed Rounder the record afterward and sat back to wait. They were taken by it. They saw the dif culty of selling it, because it’s dark and very intense, but they said, ‘This is a strong artistic statement, and we look forward to working with it.’

“It’s dif cult to make this type of music in today’s industry climate” — he’s referring to the pop market’s current focus on disposable music and interchangeable performers. “The family side of things has helped us a lot. I know why bands break up: touring, getting in each other’s faces all the time. Being family, Margo and I are used to arguing and ignoring it ve minutes later. And [bassist] Alan Anton has been my friend since I was ve. Our earnings are split pretty evenly. I don’t want to be living higher than my brother [drummer Peter Timmins] or sister is living. And the music still interests us; we still love to get together and play. Whenever we regroup after a few months off, it’s fun!” Even when bloodshed and soul searching are involved.

 

Cowboy Junkies play, with Sarah Harmer, at the State Theatre, June 14, at 7:30 p.m. Call (207) 775-3331.

 

Sam Pfeifle can be reached at spfeifle@phx.com.