InRO Weekly — Volume 1, Issue 9

made the foundation of her austere 2012
album, Sing the Delta, but here that
instrument is quickly interrupted by a hard
symbol crash and a full band
accompaniment joining in, with a rollicking
Mark Knopler-style guitar solo in the
middle and a horn section worthy of
Muscle Shoals. It’s a statement of purpose
in more ways than one, but the specific
motivations for its call-to-arms are
sketched in vague terms.
DeMent saves the proper nouns and a
litany of causes that she’s fighting for (and
against) with this album for its
eight-minute second track, “Going Down to
Sing in Texas.” That song — penned after
DeMent was shocked to arrive at a Texas
university campus where she’d long
performed only to see a new sign
posted about proper etiquette for open
carry — splits the difference between
ragtime gospel and jazz shuffle, and
recalls some of the more distended late
Bob Dylan compositions. Though, unlike
Dylan, DeMent is less interested in weaving
puckish Americana myths than soberly
addressing the people who inspire her to
stand her ground (The Chicks [née Dixie],
the Squad, Muslims) and calling out some
familiar groups of offenders (war
criminals, greedy people, Trump). It’s an
ambitious piece that sometimes trips over
the corniness of its good intentions (“I got
a plan / How about we ban hate from every
corner of this land?”), much like 1996’s
“Wasteland of the Free” did when it took a
moralizing tone against a generation that
knew “the name of every crotch on MTV.”
But the careening focus proves
instructive, and is born out over the course
of an album whose breadth is nothing
short of disarming.
The best song here, “The Sacred Now,”
not only rocks the hardest, but features
some of DeMent’s sharpest and most
economical writing in decades, an
effortless string of evocative
juxtapositions lent a kind of cosmic grace
through the singer’s see-sawing vocal
delivery: “Time speeds by, then slows
down / All is lost, hope is found.” DeMent
was at the vanguard of a new intellectual
movement in country music in the ‘90s,
and songs like “The Sacred Now” and “The
Cherry Orchard” — which feels out the
psychological contours of a character
from the Chekhov play of the same name
— remind just how singular her
songwriting voice (to say nothing of her
uniquely rural-influenced trill) has always
been. On “Nothin’ for Dead,” which
features more horn charts and gorgeous
pedal steel, DeMent gets especially
adventurous, sketching a series of short
observational vignettes with loosely
extracted life lessons, before inserting
herself into the song to comment directly
on its jumble of ideas.
In fact, the fulcrum of a lot of these
songs — the motif that holds together an
album that often seems to be pushing in
a lot of different directions at once —
tends to be a verse, or even just a few
lines, where DeMent reflects on her own
charge as an artist and as a moral
person. Toward the end of “Going Down to
Texas,” she returns to the subject of an
afterlife, but it’s suddenly become a lot
more real to her, maybe because of that
inevitable proximity to guns: “I don’t know
if there’s a judgment day or a master plan
/ But I know I want to be ready if before
the Lord I stand.” The collected
sentiments of Workin on a World, from its
ALBUM REVIEWS
most earnest moments of liberal guilt to
its poetic discursiveness, amount to a
mighty testament, a simultaneous
retrospective look at DeMent’s
career-long preoccupations as
songwriter and a building-out of her
earnest concern for the future. — SAM C.
MAC
LABEL: Flariella; RELEASE DATE:
February 24
CRACKER ISLAND
Gorillaz
“It’s a cracked-screen world,” sings Damon
Albarn on Cracker Island, the eighth
studio album from everyone’s favorite
cartoon band. Since 2001, Damon Albarn
and Jamie Hewlett have used their
Gorillaz project to hold a carnival mirror
up to society. The universe they’ve built is
wild, dark, and wacky, distorting the art
and politics of our own world into a 20+
year party playlist for the end times.
When life gets rough, human beings find
freedom on the dance floor — this is
something Damon Albarn understands
instinctively. “Are we the last living
souls?... Get up!” Albarn sang back on
2005’s Demon Days, and Cracker Island is
its creators’ latest groovy reflection on
our insane modern world.
Albarn has enjoyed a career most artists
can only dream of. The story is the stuff
of legend at this point: after bearing the
standard for the Britpop generation as
the frontman of Blur, Albarn went
left-field — teaming up with comic book
artist Jamie Hewlett to create the world’s
first “virtual band.” The experiment paid
off, to say the least, with Gorillaz
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