Rodney DeCroo - Queen Mary Trash (2010)

Tracklist

CD1
01. Queen Mary Trash
02. River Boat
03. Minotaur
04. Out of This World
05. Monument
06. Van City
07. What We've Been Saying
08. Night Field Again
09. Mist In the Valley
10. You're A Lion
11. Underground
12. Everything Is Taken From Us

CD2
01. Paris Spleen
02. You Ain't No One
03. Pleasure and Pain
04. Elijah, Come On!
05. My Love Rides
06. Napoleon Hill
07. Sorrow On the Mountain
08. Matador
09. Loser and the Tennessee Girl
10. Borderline
11. When the World Was Young
12. Voyager

Rodney DeCroo’s 2005 live record, War Torn Man, was an instant classic, and it was only his second release. He followed with 2008s quietly effective Mockingbird Bible, which dropped the widescreen country rockers, but made for great company during midnight bouts of narcotic depression. On his latest, the Vancouver, BC-based singer-songwriter migrates between both poles, covering all points in between across a sprawling, inspired double album. DeCroo shuffles noir-ish genre exercises like “Elijah, Come On!” with the Crazy Horse crunch’n'plod of “Riverboat,” while his band, the Convictions ? with no less than Carloyn Mark on backing vocals ? swing beautifully from vicious rockers like “Paris Spleen” to such indelibly pretty tracks as “Voyager.” DeCroo splits the difference on the astounding “Minotaur,” pouring acid on his psychic wounds, against an almost pillow-y sound. The result is like soft rock with fangs. As ever, DeCroo’s best subject is himself, largely because his biography is a horror show of madness, violence and addiction. Canada certainly has bigger roots stars, but none who write as vividly and affectingly about the road back from Hell. “You ain’t Steve Earle, you ain’t Neil Young, you ain’t Bob Dylan,” he sings in “You Ain’t No One.” But he is Rodney DeCroo, which is really starting to count for something.

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