Slaid Cleaves – No Angel Knows

The Philo debut by this Maine-to-Texas transplant benefits from the inviting warmth of Cleaves boyish tenor and the deft understatement of Gurf Morlixs production, but suffers from an inconsistency of material. Too easily, Cleaves settles for folk cliches, in songs that reflect the influence of other songs more than the uniqueness of the writers experience or insight. If this were a school paper, the teacher would grade it higher on penmanship than content.

At this point in his development, Cleaves writes more effectively in the third person than the first; his songs more compelling when hes telling someone elses story than unburdening his own soul. Dance Around the Fire is Cleaves at his best, offsetting the sing-song buoyancy of the campfire chorus with the bittersweet resignation of its quiet-desperation verses, through a maturity of craft and depth of feeling that express as much between the lines as within them. Jennies All Right is similarly artful, a slice-of-life portrait that reflects Cleaves eye for telling detail and his ability to say something significant without seeming to strain too hard. The album closes with the elegiac strains of 29, a mountain spiritual of such emotional purity that Cleaves seems incapable of sounding a false note.

At the other extreme, on a string of cliches such as The River Runs The highways scattered with the bones of the winners and the losers, all tangled in blue its way too easy to tell where the Springsteen ends and the Dylan begins. Last of the V-8s could pass as Springsteen parody (or tribute, I suppose), while the Pilgrims Progress naivete of Not Going Down Ive been the loser desperate to win/And Ive tasted snake oil and Ive tasted sin finds redemption in its stirring hook rather than its assortment of recycled images.

The bonus of working with producer Morlix (Lucinda Williams, Butch Hancock) is that guitarist Morlix is part of the package, with the slap bass of Kevin Smith, the spare drumming of Donald Lindley and the vocal harmonies of Karen Poston and fiddler Darcie Deaville further distinguishing the results from the run of the folkie mill. The best of the material here shows that Cleaves has plenty of promise; the rest shows how far he has to go.