Cowboy Junkies Sublimely Deal With Loss on Such Ferocious Beauty
The Cowboy Junkies skirt the liminal spaces between life, death, dementia, bounty, ferocious beauty, and guitar rock on their sublime new album.
There used to be bands that were often labeled “thinking man’s rock,” and seemed to be music made for English major types. R.E.M., 10,000 Maniacs, and The Cowboy Junkies were three of the best of these bands. They plumbed the depths of themes like angst, identity, and the individual as well as love and hate. These bands did so while skirting the liminal spaces between popular culture and literary theory, as well as between rock music, country music, and folk. Two of the three bands mentioned are no more (or at least don’t exist as they did at the time), Thankfully, Cowboy Junkies are still writing and recording the type of music that is thoughtful and accessible at the same time. With Such Ferocious Beauty, Cowboy Junkies embark on their 4th decade of songwriting and show no signs of slowing down, abandoning literary aspirations in their songwriting, or betraying their sound.
That sound employs electric guitars that give way to fiddles which in turn give way to acoustic guitars, sometimes all in the same song. This varying sound is what makes them so indelible to their listeners, and critics. This sound is augmented on Such Ferocious Beauty in new ways though, mostly foreign to the band’s historical sound. This is mostly the result of the Cowboy Junkies’ founding members, the Timmins siblings (Margo, Peter, and Michael), experience with loss. Much like Dave Grohl’s recent experience informed The Foo Fighters’ latest release, the experience explicitly shows up in the music here as well. The Timmins’ loss is different in nature than Grohl’s, if no less poignant. Their father’s battle with dementia and the toll it takes on one and one’s family forms the basis of the themes of loss, frustration, quiet moments of lucidity, and an ambivalent, and at times careless, God that permeates the album. These somber, yet at times sublimely beautiful themes (and the angst they engender) seep into the music pushing it into a new, louder space than it has occupied in the past.
Songs like “Hard to Build. Easy to Break” push Cowboy Junkies’ sound into more clearly defined guitar rock territory with its wailing electric guitar lines. “Flood,” with its spooky reverb and loudly angst-ridden riffs perfectly supplement Margo’s metaphorically world-destroying imagery of rising waters and sinking souls and dreams. Water imagery washes through the song, but instead of delivering a cleansing rebirth, it brings death, not just of the body, but of the mind and all its hopes. It’s a painful, yet beautiful moment on the album that is unmatched, even in Cowboy Junkie’s long catalog of ferociously beautiful songs.
Like on most Cowboy Junkies albums, the songs on Such Ferocious Beauty tell a story. The songs vary from their father’s perspective on events to the perspectives of those around him, especially his loved ones. It’s almost like a sonic Faulkner novel where the reader, here the listener, gets the story in fragments, pieces that are assembled by the listener to create a full picture of the sorrow and frustration that informs the loss of a loved one. When Margo elevates, or more aptly equates, her father’s loss of mental faculty, and the toll it takes on those closest to him, with Odysseus’ being lost at sea in “Circe and Penelope” the universality of our human experience, which stretches all the way back into the mythic past, hits with a power that is impossible to put into words, as is the response in the listener.
Indescribably beautiful, literary, and every moment worth its name, Such Ferocious Beauty is not only one of the best albums that you will hear this year, but it is also one of the best albums that you will hear from any band.
