Cowboy Junkies – Early 21st Century Blues

The Cowboy Junkies will probably always be caught between the desire not to mess with a good thing and the urge to break with formula. For the last fifteen years or so — that is, the period since the breakthrough of The Trinity Session — conflicting aspirations have caught most of the band’s work in buzzing stasis.

Early 21st Century Blues doesn’t alter that: As ever, Margo Timmins sings a vibrato lullaby as the music swells and recedes like moonlit tides. Furthermore, this album features only two original compositions alongside nine covers — an imbalance that, for a band which reached its commercial peak with dreamlike interpretations of Lou Reed’s “Sweet Jane” and Neil Young’s “Powderfinger”, suggests artistic sluggishness.

The choices are supposed to suggest something else. From traditional numbers such as “No More” and “Two Soldiers” to a pair of recent Springsteen songs, “Brothers Under The Bridge” and “You’re Missing”, the album deals in war, loss and dissent. It also seeks intimacy, framing spare takes on Richie Havens’ “Handouts In The Rain” and U2’s “One” as laments on how the political affects the personal.

But the Cowboy Junkies’ contradictions manifest themselves in defeating ways. The urge to break formula spikes a serviceable funk-lite version of John Lennon’s acid “I Don’t Want To Be A Soldier” with a substandard middle-eight rap (by an artist listed only as “Rebel”), while the desire not to mess with a good thing swathes Early 21st Century Blues in soporific gentility. What should be an angrily sorrowful murmur becomes a piteously soft protest.