Johnny Dowd – The Pawnbroker’s Wife

Given the elasticity of his imagination, you’d think Johnny Dowd could write a simple love song. With “I Love You”, he gives it a valiant try. The result is a ballad clocking in at 1:16 that’s suitable for the Shangri-Las, if not quite the Chiffons. Faux symphonic R&B and girl-group/falsetto harmony provide a pristine setting, but in the end, Dowd can’t help himself. He’s not just in love, he’s “desperately” so, and he can’t believe “we sank so low.” There is no love without enigma among the very least of its downsides, and Dowd will be the last to ever let you forget it.

The Pawnbroker’s Wife as a whole moves Dowd a quarter-inch closer to mainstream pop. It’s the most listenable record of his oeuvre. The music hints of blues, rock, jazz and R&B — even Broadway in its treatment of the obscure Lee Hazlewood/Ann-Margret duet “Sleep(in) In The Grass”. Still, the arrangements open a whole encyclopedia of variations on menace, practically defining a new genre.

Despite the often morbid content, the songs, remarkably, are never actually morose. Dowd seems well enough acquainted with his demons to keep them at bay. If you don’t count the execution, against which “Judgment Day” (rendered by Dowd and Jon Langford on the Pine Valley Cosmonauts’ The Executioner’s Last Songs) is a worthy tirade, The Pawnbroker’s Wife features only one murder, and that’s actually in the context of “True Love”: The murderer travels from Oklahoma to Tennessee to put flowers on her husband’s grave for their wedding anniversary.

The paranoid schizophrenic apparition “Billy Blu” is laced with wit, and “Woody Guthrie Blues” sets dust bowl imagery in electronica and “Tusk”-like percussion. Two tracks will be essential for Christmas compilations: the jazzy-bluesy “Jingle Bells”, on which Kim Sherwood-Caso’s vocals dance impassionately over Dowd’s zombie drone, and “On Shakey Ground We Stand”, the soundtrack for those dreaded holiday dinners with extended family.

Throughout, Dowd’s lacerated vocals, and the peculiar locution that betrays his Oklahoma upbringing, warm these tracks with humanity. His perception may be off-kilter, but his sense of humor is intact. And he wouldn’t take you to the dark side if he didn’t know the way back.