Ray Lamontagne - 'Trouble' (Echo)
4/5
By: Kevin Molloy
Ray Lamontagne comes with some weighty roots credibility. The alt-country guru that produced Ryan Adams' winsome sound, Ethan Johns, works his simple magic here; whilst Nickel Creek's fiddle player (Sarah Watkins) drops her skills onto many of the tracks. If you can think where this sound is heading, you're probably absolutely right.
The album contains no surprises in genre, subject-matter, or anything else, really. In fact, Ray plays up to the troubadour image his surname implies: a healthy two tracks are named after different girls - good, old-fashioned emotional promiscuity from the singer-songwriter. The lyric, 'I still don't know what love means, Jolene' is only bolstered by the subsequent 'la, la, la, la...'. That track title, by the way: 'Jolene'. Of course.
That's not to say the generic approach isn't always unappealing. When's the last time you listened to a folk singer warbling a cautionary tale? Probably for most the honour lies with Bob Dylan or similar, but Ray revives the tradition in 'Narrow Escape' ('This ain't no time for that ball and chain...' Sing it, Ray.)
An obvious touchstone, producer in mind, is Ryan Adams, but 'Trouble' steers relatively wide of a clear-cut 'alt-country' tagging; the lyrics flow never-endingly throughout, and identifiable choruses are distinctly lacking - the occasional repeated phrase is much more the nature of Ray's lyricism.
The guitar is similarly slow-burning: this isn't strumming stuff. It's so sparse you could thread a-whole-nother song through the gaps. The pace draws your attention irrepressibly towards that vocal at the centre; it's a masterful production on Johns' part: despite a fine level of instrumentation and complexity, the overall effect translates to hearing Ray himself sat at a campfire... the microphone in Ray's soul, for optimal 'closeness'. And that vocal itself is easily the best part of this LP: take a huge dollop of Ben Harper's soul and stir it in with a pinch of US of A twang, and then have it tremble soulfully over those six-strings, a timbre of unmistakeable quality. There's a lot of gospel to this music too, much like he of the Innocent Criminals, but without the religion, simply the vibrancy and heartfelt swelling of the vocal to magnificent proportions.
Having praised the finishing touches of this album, however, they can also be its downfall. 'How Come' is the prime example, a supposed 'protest song' - of truly mediocre American values. The Sheryl Crow fabrication of the song hardly fits the concept of remonstration, yet it is seemingly obvious that repeatedly asking 'how come' will progress our understanding of current affairs, resolve the problem at hand, and make Ray look like an all-round profound chap. Obviously. So in complaint: how can we hope to leave the destructive road that we're upon, if we adhere so stringently to the middle of it in songs like this?
In all, however, the LP is a success. 'Trouble' - like a decent bourbon or scotch: few can hope to achieve the heights of the master-distiller, but there are many excellent stop-gaps between those rarer glasses. Of which 'Trouble' is a variety of particular, refreshing note.
Artists in this article: Ray Lamontagne
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