Three siblings from Toronto – Margo (vocals), Michael (guitar) and Peter Timmins (drums), as well as childhood friend Alan Anton on bass - Cowboy Junkies perform blues and roots based acoustic music mixed in with old school folk rock that recalls the likes of Fairport Convention
The album opens with Margo singing an a cappella song about miners, before the very folky Misguided Angel. Dobros twitter, accordion lingers. I Don’t Get It is a harmonica-backed blues piece, while there’s a lovely acoustic mash-up with Blue Moon Revisited (Song For Elvis). To Love Is To Bury is a lengthy ballad with accordion and fiddle, just simple sad beauty. Working On A Building is a languid blues, one of the tracks that sound like it could be done by Tom Waits except Margo Timmins’ voice is so much more pleasant on the ear, and there’s a very laid-back cover of Sweet Jane that manages to both capture and radically change the mood of the Lou Reed original.
The album was recorded on a single mike in a church, and you can hear the echo sometimes; towards the end the overall sound gets so quiet and intimate that the Timmins must be sat in a very tight circle around the microphone; it gives the whole sound an immediacy, and was done deliberately as a response to the over-use of MIDI in contemporary recording – one of the albums I recently listened to for my Bonus Albums section for the Eighties has a very MIDI-influenced sound that I hadn’t really though of before. This album has a much more organic feel to it compared to a lot of the artificiality and over-production of the Eighties, and I think we’re seeing a return to a less overtly digital production.
The flipside is that the songs on this album are all quite delicate and lo-fi – nice individually, all quite soothing, but also slightly unsatisfying, the musical equivalent of a rice cracker.
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