Michael Hurley – Down In Dublin

With his simple three-chord songs, unadorned voice and delivery, and straightforward lyrics, Michael Hurley makes it sound so effortless; his music feels like it has a momentum (albeit off-kilter) of its own, and he’s just along for the ride. But it’s an easiness that’s hard-won, and there’s usually a sense of more, usually a mysterious more, beneath the surface of his traditional-progressive, acoustic-electric country-folk-blues.

Down In Dublin, recorded mostly with Ireland’s Rough Deal String Band after they backed him on a tour of the British Isles, is no exception. The songs are primarily in Hurley’s three favorite deadpan modes — dark, darkly funny, funny — with a little unabashed romanticism mixed in. Some of them he’s recorded before (an expanded version of the wobbling “Slurf Song”), and there are more remakes than one expects on a Hurley set, from obscurities such as Lonnie Irving’s trucking “Gooseball Brown” to familiar fare such as Townes Van Zandt’s “Pancho And Lefty”.

But his originals are characteristically like nursery rhymes for world-weary adults, and by the time he’s done, all the material fits together as his and his alone. Nor does he fail to introduce new characters, such as “Uncle Smoochface” (“He run into the ladies room because he needs to pee/He loves to meet the ladies when they take a leak/He is a sloppy smoocher and he gives their face a lick/Uncle Smoochface makes them sick”).

There’s maybe a tad more fancy picking than usual, but you’ve got to hand it to a guy who can constantly keep you coming back for more of what initially seems like such monochromatic music.