'The Smiling & Beautiful Countryside' is the latest (his fifth) album from Canadian folk singer/songwriter Jon Brooks.
Jon's strength here is being able to pull of a startlingly original collection of completely self-penned rural Canadian murder ballads. Jon has even listed the songs in certain sections such as 'Anarchic Political Commentary', Serial Killers, Domestic Abuse, and Gallows Humour, so that the discerning CD buyer can set his (or her) player to play items within that section.
In addition to this, Jon has also written these stories either referencing or in the style of classic writers, such as John Milton, Karl Marx, William Shakespeare and Charles Baudelaire. In fact the album title itself is a quote from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes!
The album opens with 'Gun Dealer', the tale of an armaments dealer hawking his wares, much in the style of Tom Waits' 'Step Right Up', which lends a humorous twist to what is in these days a very contentious issue: - “I got one Sten, two Brens, three or four Remingtons, an L2A3 Submachine/ I got more fire power than the Israeli Army/ Got a gun for small prey, a gun for display/ It doesn't have to shoot to make 'em do what you say”.
A few tracks are long and contain a real story, such as 'The Only Good Thing Is An Old Dog' which at over eleven minutes manages to mix humour, politics and spree killing: - “I sat down in the lobby, my hands kinda hurt/ I put my feet up on a corpse in a Dior pencil skirt/ The intolerable Law so predictably came/ Their sirens sang the opposite of Barber's Agnus Dei. “Who is it that can tell me who I am? Am I a psychopath or a paradoxical Man?”.”
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That said, Jon manages equally to show that sometimes less is more with the wonderful 'These Are Not Economic Hard Times', running at just over one and a half minutes Jon manages to channel the politics of the dispossessed in just a few lines: - “And these are not 'economic hard times' (x 2)/ These are the days, after the days (x 2)/ When we were robbed.” Which kind of sums up the whole system of corrupt governments and corporate greed, and manages to strike the listener with its' directness and simplicity at the same time.
Overall, this is a wonderful album, which as a collection of murder ballads gives Nick Cave a run for his money any day, as whereas Cave uses orchestration to gain atmosphere, Jon does it by having everything stripped down, so that the main focus has to be on the lyrics. This is a wonderfully well-written album, which deserves recognition.
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