Johnny Dowd has never been easy to listen to. He sings in an atonal drawl that seems not so much incapable of carrying a tune as uninterested in trying. His band (Dowd on guitar, longtime drummer Brian Wilson, and keyboardist Michael Stark) plays jolting, scraping music that leans sometimes toward prog-jam busyness and other times toward slabs of Sabbath-inflected blues. His lyrics bristle with cynicism about relationships, religion, and most anything else that catches his jaundiced eye.
At his best, especially when joined by sweet-voiced singer Kim Sherwood-Caso (who appears on about half of Cruel Words), he makes something like industrial roots music. Elsewhere, as on a pointless cover of “Johnny B. Goode” that segues into the “Iron Man” riff, he’s a reminder that the label “garage band” isn’t always a compliment.
Dowd has a great backstory: A moving-company owner from Ithaca, New York, he didn’t record his first album until he was almost 50. And he has the kind of rugged American visage (think Jim Jarmusch crossed with Sam Shepard) and fierce class consciousness (“You’ve got your capitalist religion, preaching the bottom line,” he sneers on “Miracles Never Happen”) that all but guarantee a cult following in Europe. This is his seventh album, and I’m not sure anybody but cultists really needs to hear more than the first two.
But it’s hard to blame him for plugging along. Listening to his music is still a lot more fun than hauling sofas, and I’m guessing making it is, too.
