Johnny Cash
American IV: The Man Comes Around

THE REVIEW

With this album, recorded and released a few months before his death, Johnny Cash concludes the series of American Recordings, strongly desired and produced by Rick Rubin. Surely what makes this work unique and very intense are the Cashian versions of Personal Jesus (Depeche Mode) and Hurt (Nine Inch Nails), where one feels respect and a hint of tenderness, considering that our man “omits” the harshest words, being the deep believer he was, to then duet with Nick Cave, whom many have defined as his most worthy heir.

There is the heart-wrenching version of Simon & Garfunkel’s Bridges Over Troubled Water, which, at the moment of saying "I'm on your side", with that voice broken by age, seems to show the Man in Black beside your bed, guitar slung over his shoulder.
The song that starts it all, "When The Man Comes Around", is a ballad that illustrates the day of judgment with resurrecting dead and the Man walking among them, calling them by name... "hear the trumpets and the bells... a million angels are singing" invokes the splendid chorus, giving breath to imaginary cohorts of angels to breach the walls of Jericho.
But it’s the listening, especially the watching of the stunning video of Hurt that measures the sense of loss and the closeness of the end that the man must have felt in those days... The strength of Reznor's song here is rendered tired and creaky, accompanied by just a few piano notes; the memory of his beloved wife June Carter, who died shortly before, must have haunted the recording of the track, because the quality of the sound is truly that of a march for the ghosts or, more realistically, the lament of a sick man at the end of his journey.

Truly, truly moving; even the splendid "I'm So Lonely I Could Cry" by Hank Williams gives the whole an aura of distance and melancholy, of acceptance of the inevitable, as if you saw your father walk away into a forest, waving his hand and bidding you farewell; for the last time.