Call it Exile From Blue Mountain, with an emphasis on the blues. Since the dissolution of both his marriage and the highly-regarded band he shared with his former wife, Laurie Stirratt, Cary Hudson has tapped even deeper into the musical wellspring of his native Mississippi. With his second solo release, he draws inspiration from the likes of John Hurt (on the playful sensuality of this album’s title track) and Fred McDowell (the slicing slide guitar of “Haunted House Blues”) on a collection that barely acknowledges the country side of alt-country.
It’s an album of raging passions, open wounds and bittersweet reflections. Like John Doe after X and Richard Thompson after Linda, Hudson plays with a reckless intensity, careening his way through the album-opening “Things Ain’t What They Used To Be” with scant regard for control or craft. There’s a primal power within the stripped-down urgency of the arrangements, from the squall of howling harmonica and slide guitar on “Jellyroll” to the hoedown romp through “Free State Of Jones”.
Where the song cycle opens with a rush of upheaval, the closing “Some Things Never Change” could be heard as older-but-wiser affirmation — either a return full-circle or a fresh renewal. The thematic progression shows Hudson’s reflective side — the morning after the long night’s rock ‘n’ roll binge. “8 Bar Blues” finds its metaphor for a music career, if not the human condition, in the vagaries of a pool hall, while “Don’t Hasten Away” could pass as one of Richard Thompson’s traditional British ballads, with the album’s linchpin lyric: “Nothing good can last for long, unless it lives on in a song.”