Rosanne Cash - "Black Cadillac"
(Capitol USA, 2006)
Rosanne Cash has gone through a lot in the two years between her last album Rules of Travel and her latest effort Black Cadillac. She lost her stepmother, June Carter Cash, her father, Johnny Cash, and her birth-mother -- all in the span of 22 months. That depth of grief, loss and acceptance comes through loud and clear and makes Black Cadillac a multi-layered experience you have to hear many times before the true depth of the material begins to unravel.
The title track opens the album with a dark sense of mourning. "It was a black Cadillac that drove you away. Everybody's talkin' but they don't have much to say ... one of us gets to go to heaven, one has to stay here in hell," she sings as a pulsing bass and guitar set the backbeat, reminiscent of her father's signature style. "It's a lonely world," she says, "just a numbers game. Minus you, minus blood ... my blood." As dark as country has been able to get over the years, this tops it all. It's a raw track that really hits you hard and sets the mood for the rest of the album.
"I Was Watching You" features a beautiful melody anchored by piano, as Cash touches on life, love and childhood -- and how family suffers when a father's life is on the road. Cash paints her biography with hard strokes, digging deep and exposing decades of pain, and the result is stunning. "See those little girls dressed like China dolls, all for one then one by one they fall ... you never came back, but I know you tried." It all falls apart, but there's love -- that's the bottom line here, and Cash's heartfelt vocals really put the listener in her place.
Not all the songs are dark in the same way. "Burn Down This Town" opens with a chugging guitar line and ghostly background singers providing a haunting edge for a rocking number in which Cash sings of a haunted ghost town jail and a man's quest to burn it all to the ground. But Cash's best songs seem to be the quiet ballads. "God Is In The Roses" is a beautiful song of mourning and rebirth that starts out in the same vein as "I Was Watching You," then develops into an amazingly deep arrangement that echoes her pain through a complex melding of guitar, banjo and piano over which Cash adds layered harmony.
Black Cadillac is a dark and painful album to hear on first listen. Clearly a lot of soul searching went into crafting the dozen tracks that make up the album, and Rosanne Cash should be commended for being able to meld these painful lyrical memories into songs that contain so many layers of melody. This is as powerful as country music gets, and it should hold up as one of the best albums the genre's going to have to offer in 2006. It's certainly the best album Rosanne Cash has recorded in the twenty-five years since her masterpiece Seven Year Ache. And that's more than enough of a reason for every music fan to own this album.
Preview The Album
http://www.rosannecash.com/bchome/rcash_sampler/index.html
From the above link you can hear "Black Cadillac," "I Was Watching You" and "House on the Lake" in streaming audio. There's also a video linked from the same page.
Rosanne Cash has gone through a lot in the two years between her last album Rules of Travel and her latest effort Black Cadillac. She lost her stepmother, June Carter Cash, her father, Johnny Cash, and her birth-mother -- all in the span of 22 months. That depth of grief, loss and acceptance comes through loud and clear and makes Black Cadillac a multi-layered experience you have to hear many times before the true depth of the material begins to unravel.
The title track opens the album with a dark sense of mourning. "It was a black Cadillac that drove you away. Everybody's talkin' but they don't have much to say ... one of us gets to go to heaven, one has to stay here in hell," she sings as a pulsing bass and guitar set the backbeat, reminiscent of her father's signature style. "It's a lonely world," she says, "just a numbers game. Minus you, minus blood ... my blood." As dark as country has been able to get over the years, this tops it all. It's a raw track that really hits you hard and sets the mood for the rest of the album.
"I Was Watching You" features a beautiful melody anchored by piano, as Cash touches on life, love and childhood -- and how family suffers when a father's life is on the road. Cash paints her biography with hard strokes, digging deep and exposing decades of pain, and the result is stunning. "See those little girls dressed like China dolls, all for one then one by one they fall ... you never came back, but I know you tried." It all falls apart, but there's love -- that's the bottom line here, and Cash's heartfelt vocals really put the listener in her place.
Not all the songs are dark in the same way. "Burn Down This Town" opens with a chugging guitar line and ghostly background singers providing a haunting edge for a rocking number in which Cash sings of a haunted ghost town jail and a man's quest to burn it all to the ground. But Cash's best songs seem to be the quiet ballads. "God Is In The Roses" is a beautiful song of mourning and rebirth that starts out in the same vein as "I Was Watching You," then develops into an amazingly deep arrangement that echoes her pain through a complex melding of guitar, banjo and piano over which Cash adds layered harmony.
Black Cadillac is a dark and painful album to hear on first listen. Clearly a lot of soul searching went into crafting the dozen tracks that make up the album, and Rosanne Cash should be commended for being able to meld these painful lyrical memories into songs that contain so many layers of melody. This is as powerful as country music gets, and it should hold up as one of the best albums the genre's going to have to offer in 2006. It's certainly the best album Rosanne Cash has recorded in the twenty-five years since her masterpiece Seven Year Ache. And that's more than enough of a reason for every music fan to own this album.
Preview The Album
http://www.rosannecash.com/bchome/rcash_sampler/index.html
From the above link you can hear "Black Cadillac," "I Was Watching You" and "House on the Lake" in streaming audio. There's also a video linked from the same page.
posted by Jonathan Sanders @ 1:18 PM
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