Joe Ely

In the last twenty years, country music and the blues have fallen. What was brilliant and
powerful has become stylized and posed. Lefty Frizzell and Little Walter no longer shatter
their bottles against the stone gates of hell. In their stead, Larry Gatlin and Barry White
paste fake flowers on the blouse of wonderment's corpse. It's good to know there are a
few men whose idea of music, rhythm and poetry precludes the spearmint cliché... More >

You know all that brouhaha about Texas music? Here's a record that bears it out for more than two songs at a time. Ely's emotional openness seems neither sentimental nor contrived. He balls the jack with irrefutable glee and sings the lonesome ones so high and hard he makes the next room sound 500 miles away. With Butch Hancock sharing the writing, there are maybe two less-than-memorable songs on the entire album. There's great (Lousiana?) accordion, apt (Mexican?) horns, and lots of (Lubbock!) rock and roll. In short, there hasn't been anything like this since Gram Parsons was around to make Grievous Angel, or do I mean Gilded Palace of Sin? (Grade: A)