Johnny Dowd: Temporary Shelter

Johnny Dowd didn't record his first album until he was almost 50, but with a vision as foreboding as his, it's a wonder he made it that far without self-destructing. Sounding like Captain Beefheart (if Don Van Vliet had explored and exploded country instead of blues) and sporting an evil streak that would frighten Tom Waits or Nick Cave, Dowd's spare and rough debut Wrong Side Of Memphis displayed a knack for darkness. Wielding his tales of death, heartache, and devastating woe with even greater assurance, Dowd topped it with his second album Pictures From Life's Other Side, which proved far meatier in sound, though just as bleakly limited in scope. Temporary Shelter, album number three, finds Dowd's music continuing to twist and turn in strange directions. Having honed his small but suitably idiosyncratic band on the road, Dowd dives right into a swirl of dungeon blues, electronics-dusted country, skewed surf music, and (of course) uneasy imagery. The disc begins with "Vengeance Is Mine," a syncopated burst of quirky percussion and synthesized bass that features singer Kim Sherwood-Caso with shaky support by Dowd, who knows when to lay low. Though Dowd is smart enough to keep his scraggly voice in check, when he does moan and groan over tracks like "Big Wave," the stuttering trash organ of "Lost Avenue," or the morphine-drip menace of "Angel Eyes," the result is predictably strange and creepy. The album's unnerving high points include the twisted march "Sky Above, Mud Below" and the almost biblically harrowing love song "Hell Or High Water," a cynical track—"It's loyalty, not romance, that binds a woman to a man"—sung with the resignation of someone who has lost a lengthy battle. Dowd's pain is piled on so deeply that his unrelenting tales of Gothic horror and relationships gone awry become almost perversely bleak, a litany of misery Poe would have appreciated. Feeling down in the dumps Dowd can make anyone's situation seem better by comparison.