Last Train Home – Time And Water

The narrator of this album’s opening cut seems to have given up lithium in favor of Ritalin. He’s wired, he’s been dumped, and he lets us know in a herky-jerky tune that could be the bastard issue of a tryst between Johnny Rotten and Ronnie Dunn. If there are 50 ways to leave your lover, there are at least as many kinds of love gone wrong, and Time And Water deals with a dozen of them, from obsession through ambivalence to heartache and resignation. Even when the protagonists find true love (“See What Love Can Do” and the magnificent cover of Bill Monroe’s “Walls Of Time”), it’s in spite of or because of someone being dead.

The wonder is that it feels so good. Last Train Home believes in entertainment, and they take their credo seriously. Their monthly gig at Iota in Arlington Virginia, has gone from one evening to two nights and a matinee, and it’s not because the patrons like to cry in their beer. Frontman Eric Brace, who writes most of the band’s material, has a knack for deft portraits of unsettled emotions, but he knows how to frame them in strong, tuneful country rock.