Johnny Dowd – Temporary Shelter

Johnny Dowd’s third release, Temporary Shelter, establishes him convincingly as one of the most talented depressives in popular music. He is also perhaps the most frightening.

While Leonard Cohen and especially Nick Cave have trod that ground before, the gleaming arc of their literacy and, respectively, the drone and theatricality of their delivery kept their gloomier insights at a safe distance, like a poisonous insect on a pin or a two-headed viper suspended in formaldehyde. By contrast, Dowd sinks his plainspoken betes noires like a hook, with crackly, vulnerable vocals and vestigial Oklahoma vowels, guilelessly bloodletting truths you work your whole life to sublimate. Every shelter, after all, is temporary.

It might be possible to discount Dowd’s lyrics if his delivery were so morose as to make it unbearable. Instead, his fatalism seems engagingly bemused rather than forlorn. If redemption is beyond reach, there is at least Bushmills in purgatory, and besides, it’s nice to know things couldn’t get worse.

Dowd’s first release, the critically acclaimed Wrong Side Of Memphis, could just as easily have been a fluke. Except for the dear “shall I compare thee to a piece of farm equipment” love song “John Deere Yeller”, Wrong Side was fifteen almost relentlessly morbid tracks involving death in its many variations: patricide, suicide, death row, psychotic murder and death wishes. One had to wonder where he could go from there.

In fact, Dowd says he intended the recording to be a kiss-off to the musical aspirations he’d tried unsuccessfully to balance with his work life for more than 20 years. At age 47, his rock ‘n’ roll religion wasn’t working as well for him as his moving business, so he repaired to his bedroom and recorded his swan songs on a four-track, unaccompanied, not much caring whether anyone would ever hear them, let alone what they’d think. Perversely (what else?), the music was the best he’d ever made, leading to U.S. and European indie-label deals and a European tour.

As it turned out, there was plenty more where that first record came from; all he had to do was work backwards. If death provided a theme for Wrong Side, he still had the whole realm of romance to cover on the follow-up, Pictures From Life’s Other Side, and with Temporary Shelter, he’s taken on his formative years, he says, as he remembers them. Throughout, he’s sustained the macabre undertones and deadpan acceptance he first established as his trademark, as well as the imaginative arrangements that color all his music, if not black, then midnight blue.

As might be expected from its title, Pictures dabbled a bit with country music shadings of the Hank Williams kind, in both the title track and in “Worried Mind”, which quoted Williams’ “Jambalaya”. But the influence was more of sensibility than of sound. Dowd’s lyric references derive exclusively from the rural South and the spirit of a working man, albeit unemployed and profoundly unlucky in love. But the form of his music derives more from rhythm & blues and twisted metal, synthesized almost beyond recognition into his gravestoned rock macabre melodies.

In contrast to the stripped-down debut, Pictures expanded Dowd’s instrumental palette to include harmonica, keyboards, banjo, piano, a second guitar and xylorimba. The result was perversely pleasing listening, showing a remarkable range within the general syntax of ominous brooding. On Temporary Shelter, Dowd has settled on the sound of his touring band: Kim Sherwood-Caso’s clear, emotionally remote vocals; Justin Asher’s many-flavored keyboards, and the drums of Brian Wilson (no, not that Brian Wilson), which he augments to beyond-the-grave effect with Moog Taurus pedals. The arrangements are vivid and varied, flavored with tasty electronic effects, as if from a Dungeons & Dragons video game.

If Temporary Shelter depicts Dowd’s memories of growing up, one hopes it does so in the way that fragmented impressions imperfectly interpreted in childhood carry forward as exaggerations and wind up under the general rubric of “baggage.” Dowd’s is heavy. The opening track, “Vengeance Is Mine”, is a woman’s vow to avenge her husband’s murder. It’s filled with details of her life as a farm worker and dark hints of the boss’s sexual harassment. “Hideaway” is a frantic and ultimately tender depiction of a mother’s instincts, and desperate efforts, to shelter her children. Dowd delivers it as a spoken-word piece, with the background music setting a post-apocalyptic mood. “Metaphor is useless,” he intones, “when you need a pair of gloves/To protect you from the violence/Of your father’s love.”

“Sky Above And Mud Below”, played as a goth march, relates the experience of being raised by an aunt and uncle when “Mama turned to religion” and “Daddy was ‘lost at sea.'” The aunt and uncle did their best according to the law of “spare the rod and spoil the child,” but, “There was something about me/Of which they were so ashamed,” the song goes, “Ain’t no way around it/Adultery is a horrible sin.”

The Sinatra perversion “Angel Eyes” could be either a torch song or a lament of lost innocence, but the soul-bent “Cradle To The Grave” treads slightly more traditional love-song territory. In a stoner croon, Dowd explains, “I could tell you pretty lies,” but “I cannot be your Jesus.” There’s actually a wide swath of fun, relatively speaking, in “Big Wave”, complete with suggestions of surfer riffs. And although “Lost Avenue” finds Dowd abandoned with his ex’s three-legged cat, the tune is all but chirpy: “Disappointment is what life is about.”

Dowd regards himself as an “Average Guy” like the one in his song, full of paranoia with a suicidal heart. It’s perhaps a necessary reminder that there are those among us, perhaps very nearby, who see in a sunny day mostly the darkness at the source of its brilliance, without which it would not be light, and to which it will return. They see in life only the death that begins with it, and in love, only the inevitable cruelties and betrayals by which it lives or dies. As Sherwood-Caso sings on “Death Comes Knocking, “You think I’m talking about them. I’m talking about you.”