REVIEW: Cracker, Gentleman's Blues (Virgin)
- Tracey Bleile
The master of sad, ironic humor has come back to the campfire to spin his yarns about the unkind and highly amusing thing that is David Lowery's alter-ego life. Yup, Cracker's back. And they've brought a whole circus with them. Lowery is the hobo clown, scary and funny once more and he's got Don Smith as his ringleader, back in as producer/engineer. What's resulted is a glowing patch of swampfire for us to stumble onto in the dark with Gentleman's Blues. Lowery's back with his own brand of sneaky savagery after doing it someone else's way (1996's The Golden Age) which drills the industry in the bitterest and best track on the disc, "Star". "Gonna make you a star../We'll blow you through the door/into a million bits / We'll even sample it/That's how we'll make a hit/And make you a star..." Insert one chill down one spine here.
The current Cracker state of things draws on the circus analogy of long roads and freak shows on more than one track, and it's no cute Barnum & Bailey big top...more like the carnival from "Something Wicked This Way Comes". Do you dare peek between your fingers at the "unholy circus camp...a drunken trapeze act" featuring many guest musicians on the first single "The Good Life"? Do you dare ride the psycho-calliope brawl of "I Want Out of the Circus"? Get on kids, there's more where that came from. It's easy to forget you're screaming your head off when you're laughing at the same time...
There are touches of hootenanny, gritty Southern twang and a fair amount of desert rock to be found all through Gentleman. Johnny Hickman, faithful guitar player and rodeo clown keeps the wild animals moving in a circle and not escaping to eat the audience. The tasty swamp blues (the smoldering title track) with more than an edge of gospel ("Lullabye" and the mercifully easy-to-get-to hidden track) gives him a place to stretch out. A lot of the mid-tempo stuff is way more accessible and bouncy like mid-era Camper Van and earlier Cracker, and much more readily enjoyable, "Waiting For You Girl" and "Wild One" keeps the show on the road. I would even venture so far as to say he could have pulled "I Hate My Generation" from Golden Age, replaced one of the more repetitive numbers that does drag this release a bit ("The World Is Mine" is a pale imitation of "Teen Angst (What The World Needs Now"), and probably could have dispensed with the previous album altogether. But that's what you get when you take a clown out of his element and try and make him be the star of the show. But leave it to him to make it his own show once again, it is as it should be; part sideshow, part revival meeting, all entertaining.
