Disc of the day
Heaven 17 - Penthouse And Pavement
From Sheffield, synth pop and funk to stick it to Thatcher. Currently being played live!
Features Disc of the day
Townes Van Zandt
Delta Momma Blues
(Tomato, 1971)
Mean, hopeless and yet oddly beguiling with it.
I have too many Townes Van Zandt albums, some below-par and unnecessary, and yet I still feel the need to hold on to them. Some contain just a few good songs, while others reveal a man whose voice is shot and whose will has gone, with only his withered grip on the guitar neck and its six sharp strings stopping him from sliding into the roadside ditch of whisky catalepsy. Yet, on all of these records there are moments where Van Zandt taps into a fatalistic romanticism, spinning wounded degenerate lieder for the bitter, lonesome wanderer in all of us. Delta Momma Blues was Van Zandt's fourth studio album, recorded in 1970 before the singer had fully jumped into the perilous drug gorge of later years, yet while the cover gives some indication of where the then 26-year-old singer was at - wearily bemused, bookish, standing to one side of a street-level romantic clinch - it doesn't begin to convey the clammy air of jaded passivity that was already pocketing in the dank folds of Van Zandt's patchwork landscape. Album opener, the trad. arr. FFV, despite being about a speeding train ("the swiftest on the line") that smashes into a young boy, moves with a dope-heavy ache, while Brand New Companion's tale of a woman who "chases away those howlin' bottles of wine" never escapes its low-end bum-booze blear. Yet it's when the songs are thoroughly devoid of hope and tradition, as on the sweetly tragic Come Tomorrow ("It's strange how many tortured mornings / Fell upon us with no warning"), or Rake and Nothin' - which both possess the dark, nihilist worldview of the habitual addict - that Delta Momma Blues takes flight into wonder. There's no way around it, here was a singer coming to realise that, for him, "sorrow and solitude are the precious things / And the only words worth rememberin'". With "Outrage my joyful companion...[and] a laughter the devil would frighten," this rake Van Zandt makes emotional cruelty soar like a high idealism. This is the path he was starting out on. There would be no way back.
Andrew Male
Posted by Danny_Eccleston at 6:00 AM GMT 26/05/2009
Further Listening
Townes Van Zandt – Flyin’ Shoes (Tomato, 1973)
Guy Clark – Old No. 1 (RCA, 1975)
Smog – Kicking A Couple Around (Drag City, 1996)
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