Alejandro Escovedo – Bourbonitis Blues

By the standards of a business in which marketing campaigns are measured in years instead of weeks, and new records, even by cult artists, are dropped on us like major position papers, this is a modest effort: a mix of covers and fresh originals, studio tracks and live cuts, bound together with no apparent logic other than it’s all good, warm, current work. It is a modesty to be applauded. Bourbonitis Blues, Alejandro Escovedo’s followup to last year’s wonderful road-tapes smorgasbord More Miles Than Money, hearkens back to a vinyl age (nine songs, 38 minutes) when albums were often nothing more, or less, than a collection of snapshots, a roundup of recent adventures and newly hatched, or discovered, songs. If you want to admire a lasting monument to Escovedo’s talent, go back to his 1996 Rykodisc release With These Hands; if you just want to be nailed, gently, with heart and hook, step over here.

The repertoire is not as haphazard as it seems at first. “I Was Drunk”, an elegant, original prayer in stumbling waltz time, evokes the same wounded yearning — the fall from grace, the search for redemptive comfort — as Lou Reed’s deathless “Pale Blue Eyes”, rendered here by Escovedo in tender duet with Kelly Hogan. “Sacramento & Polk”, Escovedo’s locomotive memoir of living and loving in San Francisco, in noble punk-rock squalor, during his late-’70s spell with the Nuns is brilliantly twinned at the end of the album with a stunning recasting of the Gun Club’s “Sexbeat” as a slow, delicate crawl through tortured need. And Escovedo’s passion for the heart-shaped glam of Mott The Hoople is set free twice: in a sweet cover of Ian Hunter’s elegiac “Irene Wilde”, then again in the melancholy crunch of Escovedo’s own Mott-aphonic “Guilty”.

In its abbreviated way, Bourbonitis Blues picks up from More Miles Than Money, echoing the wide range of pleasure and possibility of Escovedo’s live shows. Most of the supporting players are old cohorts: guitarist Joe Eddy Hines, drummer Hector Munoz and violinist David Perales, all members of Escovedo’s Austin-based strings’n’things orchestra. The version of John Cale’s “Amsterdam” (drawn from an all-covers session produced by Chris Stamey) has been in Escovedo’s concert repertoire since the late ’80s. The rusty-bucket stomp of “Everybody Loves Me” brings back fond memories of Escovedo’s trouble-boys band, Buick MacKane.

It’s easy to think of Bourbonitis Blues as fine but lesser Escovedo. This is, after all, a guy once named by this magazine as the artist of the decade. But art, as anyone who does it knows, is an ongoing thing. It needs some place to go, someone to receive it, and — despite what Bruce Springsteen or the Smashing Pumpkins might tell you — it doesn’t always get better with waiting and tinkering. Think of Bourbonitis Blues as something that would fit nicely on two sides of a twelve-inch, black-vinyl pizza. It was made in the same spirit.