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Rating: Exquisite guitarist, tireless composer, intense lyricist both politically and socially as well as sentimentally, a person of disarming kindness, availability, and humility, a true legend in his country but with quite limited popularity on this side of the world (which is a blessing for those of us close to him who can thus enjoy the subtle pleasure of the almost hidden gem...), Bruce Cockburn from Ottawa is one of my absolute legends, simply my favorite Canadian songwriter (Mitchell, Young, and Cohen included, oh yes).
If mother nature had also provided him with a brighter and more significant voice and his songwriting, exquisite yet consistently intimate and collected, had devised a slightly lavish and spectacular component suitable to also captivate the more superficial and distracted mass of listeners, we would have perfection. But there's enough to be content with (euphemism) as you go through the almost thirty albums that punctuate the career of this great North American man, who took his first tentative steps from the early seventies, quickly improved and evolved instrumentally and conceptually over time, developing his various musical, social, and sentimental aspects and interests. So much so that now he finds himself aging splendidly, with untamed qualitative persistence in his production, a gift reserved for the modest and the righteous, incapable of being dazzled by their own talent and inevitably going adrift after their first major successes.
The effect of listening to this still recent work (2003) is not unlike, at least to my accustomed ears, that of many other occasions: you first feel you are in the presence of a classic Cockburn record, perhaps more acoustic than usual, made somewhat monotonous by his calm and melancholic vocal style. Then, as the listens progress, the tracks emerge one by one, like mushrooms in the undergrowth, and for almost each of them, the true magic comes to focus, the unmissable atmospheres or instrumental and vocal passages of crystalline class that ennoble them.
I refer, for example, to the high-level acoustic guitar solo on the swinging "Trickle Down," not to mention the delightful, refined, and challenging jazz singing that makes "Everywhere Dance" a sonic delicacy and the second most remarkable moment of the album. The first of these being the verbose song that gives the collection its title, more than nine minutes of Bruce's delirious spoken monologue, surrounded by a bewildering pout-pourry of synthetic and real sounds (the harmonica by Gregoire Maret is fabulous here) capable of giving incredible strength to the images he evokes in the lyrics. Only a couple of times, midway and at the end of the track, does liberation from this claustrophobic scenario occur with the unfolding of a chorus of acute and consoling sense of refuge, with Bruce's voice harmonized with that of the great American singer Emmylou Harris.
And again, speaking of moments of high-level and/or superior lyricism scattered throughout the album, one must mention the daring vocal melody that climbs almost two octaves to draw the verses of "Put It In Your Heart," as well as the driving fingerpicking that masterfully and sentimentally propels the tense "Wait No More," and continue with the highly poetic folk-rapped lyrics of "Letters from Cambodia," devastating like the subject it tackles: landmines. "Celestial Horses" instead represents blues in Bruce Cockburn's manner, backed on the choruses by colleague Jackson Browne (certainly the artist most similar to him in tone and vocal style, poetic sensibility, political, and social activism, etc.).
The album concludes with a couple of more traditional and "rustic" episodes, less contaminated by urban inserts (rap, loops, jazz, electronics...) which, used in the work with a certain continuity but always with moderation and taste, update and refresh the music without compromising its reference genre (American folk-rock, and one of the best). Especially the final "Messenger Wind," almost solely for voice and acoustic guitar, plucked by our artist with his delightful and virtuosic style, provides an excellent goodbye (or rather, hear you again) for this brilliant, modest, and classy artist; in a word: a righteous one.
Tracklist and Lyrics
07 Postcards From Cambodia (06:57)
Abe Lincoln once turned to somebody and said:
Do you ever find yourself talking with the dead?
There are three tiny deaths heads carved out of mammoth tusk
on the ledge in my bathroom.
They grin at me in the morning when Im taking a leak,
but they say very little.
Outside Phnom Penh theres a tower, glass-pannelled,
maybe ten meters high,
filled with skulls from the killing fields.
Most of them lack the lower jaw
so they dont exactly grin,
but they whisper, as if from a great distance,
of pain, and of pain left far behind
Eighteen thousand empty eyeholes peering out at the four directions
Electric fly buzz green moist breeze
Bonecoloured Brahma bull grazes wet eyed, (gazes??)
hobbled in hollow of mass grave
In the neighbouring field a small herd
of young boys plays soccer,
their laughter swallowed in expanding silence.
This is too big for anger,
its too big for blame.
We stumble through history so
humanly lame
So I bow down my head
Say a prayer for us all
That we dont fear the spirit
when it comes to call
Sun will soon slide down into the far end of the ancient reservoir.
Orange ball merging with its water-borne twin
below airbrushed edges of cloud.
But first it spreads itself,
a golden scrim behind fractal sweep of swooping flycatchers.
Silhouetted dark green trees,
Blue horizon.
The rains are late this year.
The sky has no more tears to shed.
But from the air Cambodia remains
a disc of wet green, bordered by bright haze.
Water-filled bomb craters sunstreak gleam
stitched in strings across patchwork land
march west toward the far hills of Thailand.
Macro analog of Angkor Wats temple walls
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