Although music often feels more disposable than ever these days, there’s still the occasional record slipping through the net that transcends gimmickry and the usual marketing shenanigans. It’s the sort of record that simply HAS to be made by its’ creators and its’ very existence feels life-affirming to the listener.
The NORTH MISSISSIPPI ALLSTARS’ new album ‘Keys to the Kingdom’ is such a record. The circumstances surrounding its’ creation were life and death in the most literal sense. In the months prior to the album’s recording, the band’s brothers Luther (guitar/ vocals) and Cody Dickinson (drums/vocals) lost their father, the celebrated Memphis music legend Jim Dickinson, only weeks before Luther himself became a father for the first time.
Such things change any sane person’s worldview for keeps, so it’s no surprise these seismic events heavily inform the songs on ‘Keys to the Kingdom.’ The Dickinson brothers and their bassist ally Chris Chew have shown how well they have their Southern Rock chops down over the past decade, but this album (“produced for Jim Dickinson”) is the one they’ve always threatened to make.
While death’s shadow hovers over the album, the wonderful thing is that it can’t obscure the joyful and celebratory nature of many of the songs therein. The album immediately rolls its’ sleeves up and gets stuck in with the catchy, Southern-fried boogie of ‘This A’ Way’ (“as the Lord is my witness this very day/ I ain’t gonna be treated this way”) and the equally defiant ‘Jumpercable Blues’. This latter has the economy of a great, lost Creedence Clearwater Revival tune and only the ornery lyrics (“you ain’t seen the last of me pissin’ in your wishin’ well”) smash its chances of becoming a radio hit.
Elsewhere, a clutch of seriously legendary guests drop by to lend a helping hand. The low-riding Gospel-soaked R’n’B of ‘The Meeting’ describes striding through the pearly gates with your head held high (“stand up and walk on, it’s the beginning of the end/ it’s not a question of if or whether/ it’s a question of when”) while Mavis Staples lends earthy vocal support. Alvin Youngblood Hart, meanwhile, drops by to take the boys back to the country on the down-home acoustic workout ‘Ol’ Cannonball’ and Spooner Oldham plays a typically dignified piano on the plaintive, Big Star-style number ‘How I Wish My Train Would Come.’
|
Great though all these are, the album’s two absolute stand-outs are the heartfelt tributes to the late Dickinson Snr. With Spooner Oldham again riding shotgun on piano, ‘Hear the Hills’ supplies the album’s title and its’ moving lyric (“rest easy partner, now all your troubles will cease”) stays with you for ages after its wound down. Ditto ‘Ain’t No Grave’ where Luther laments “on the day death comes back my way/ I would hope to be as brave as he was on judgement day” while no less than Ry Cooder plays a suitably elegiac slide guitar.
In New Orleans funeral tradition, the album closes with ‘Jellyrollin’ All Over Heaven’: a light-hearted salute to the afterlife with Spooner Oldham again on hand with the honky-tonk piano. It’s both redemptive and a whole lotta fun and it reminds me of Townes Van Zandt’s ‘Heavenly Houseboat Blues’ which closes his ‘Late Great Townes Van Zandt’ LP an equally defiant fashion.
‘Keys to the Kingdom’ is relentlessly emotional and rarely less than ultra-personal. Thanks to the NM Allstars’ skill and dexterity, however, it never feels desolate or overtly heavy despite the subject matter. Somewhere up there, Jim Dickinson is rightly beaming with pride.
North Missisippi Allstars online
|
