As a shape-shifting trickster, Canadian Daniel Romano joins the ranks of Sturgill Simpson and even Robbie Fulks on the weirdly compelling Mosey (out May 27 on New West).
For those who know Romano from his more countrypolitan work — last year’s If I’ve Only One Time Askin’ provided a critical breakthrough — the arrangements here could well cause whiplash, owing more to a cosmopolitan mélange of Serge Gainsbourg meets Ennio Morricone than to the previous Billy Sherrill homage.
Those introduced to him with this release might consider his connection with roots music tenuous at best. The rapid-fire phrasing of the opening “Valerie Leon” serves mainly to emphasize the thinness of Romano’s reedy voice, yet the rest of these eclectic pieces, recorded in mono, somehow fit together as more than the sum of their peculiar parts.
The spirit of play and the element of surprise yoke together such disparate inspirations as Billy Joel (“One Hundred Regrets Avenue”), Leonard Cohen (Sorrow”), and Muscle Shoals (“I’m Alone Now”). The sequencing — with its circus of segues between songs — builds majestically to the hardcore country weeper, “(Gone Is) All But a Quarry of Stone.”
Perhaps the key to it all is a song Romano didn’t write, the psychedelic harpsichord filigree of Sonny Curtis’s “The Collector,” originally recorded by the Everly Brothers on their 1966 Two Yanks in England, titled after a popular British novel of the time. As Jim Lauderdale would say, “Now that’s Americana!”
