ALBUM REVIEW: Cowboy Junkies Break New Ground with ‘Such Ferocious Beauty’

Written in 2021 during the COVID epoch, while the Timmins family was navigating their father’s worsening dementia, Such Ferocious Beauty unflinchingly addresses impermanence and the ways we strive to find meaning and connection. While Cowboy Junkies draw from the bluesy Americana of their early work (The Trinity Session, The Caution Horses) as well as from the elegiac tones of recent albums (All That Reckoning, Ghosts), Such Ferocious Beauty also spotlights the Canadian quartet breaking new ground.

Margo Timmins’ vocals are more empathically vulnerable and emotionally versatile than ever. Michael Timmins’ guitar parts move seamlessly between conventional rhythms and leads and more darkly ambient voicings. Alan Anton on bass and Peter Timmins on drums seem unprecedentedly attuned, forging understated yet ambitious rhythms. In this way, Such Ferocious Beauty unfurls as a pitch-perfect sequence and late-career classic.

On opener “What I Lost,” Margo proclaims, “I woke up this morning / didn’t know who I was,” addressing the profound instability that perhaps accompanies the loss of memory, a likely reference to what the Timmins’ father may have endured. Throughout the piece, Margo’s riveting confessions are complemented by Michael’s drone-y guitar part reminiscent of early Wilco or a Sunn O))) track.

“Watching the water rise / should I follow it down to where the river meets the sea?” Margo provocatively asks on “Flood,” employing “rising water” as a symbol for the ineluctability of change, death, oblivion. The song, and album as a whole, is decidedly plaintive, though the band adeptly sidesteps fatalism, instead expressing adrenalized grief and engaging in philosophic inquiry.

On “Hard to Build, Easy to Break,” Margo’s melody is buoyed by Anton’s jazzy bass part. While she addresses the fleeting nature of things, and how destruction invariably happens more quickly than creation, she speaks to the value of non-clinging and equanimity, recommending that we “hold it not so tight.”

“Jesus is coming ready or not,” Margo declares on “Hell Is Real,” anchored by an acoustic guitar. The song unfolds as an alternate portrait of Christ and how he might function as a prophet in the current age. While the lyrics and sound conjure a contemporary dystopia, the vibe is biblical, Genesis meets Revelation.

On “Mike Tyson (Here It Comes),” Michael interweaves acoustic strums, clean melodic runs, and electric atmospherics. The result is a virtuosic blend of folk and rock textures, sonic paradoxes that bring to mind the density of Swans or acoustic Zeppelin. Margo offers ragged proclamations like a poet towering on the outskirts of a war-ravaged city. “Blue Skies” is an apt closer, underscoring our tendency to look toward the future and outside ourselves for what we need, when salvation is within us and present right now.

Recalling such late-career milestones as Leonard Cohen’s You Want It Darker, David Bowie’s Black Star, and Lucinda Williams’ recent run, including The Ghosts of Highway 20, Such Ferocious Beauty shows Cowboy Junkies fully embracing “the hero’s journey” — descending into the underworld, returning wounded yet uninhibited, emboldened by a newfound vision. The Timmins siblings plus Alan Anton may be 38 years into their career as a band, but with their latest album, they sound as if they’re starting all over.

Cowboy Junkies (photo by Heather Pollock)

Cowboy Junkies’ Such Ferocious Beauty is out June 2 on Cooking Vinyl.