Johnny Dowd: Pictures From Life's Other Side

It's something special when a talented songwriter comes out of nowhere with music so good that it's hard to imagine a time before its arrival. Johnny Dowd didn't make his first album, Wrong Side Of Memphis, until he was 49. A no-frills disc played mostly on cheaply recorded guitar and keyboard, the album introduced Dowd's disturbingly dour outlook, made all the more harrowing by the music's bare-bones nature. Its follow-up, however, is even more impressive. Abandoning that spare approach in favor of an everything-and-the-kitchen-sink racket recalling Captain Beefheart and Tom Waits, Dowd has crafted an off-kilter masterpiece in Pictures From Life's Other Side. Opening with the title track and "Worried Mind," two songs that explicitly reference Hank Williams—or maybe they're meant to conjure his vengeful ghost—the disc then twists and turns into spectacularly haunting new forms. The skewed carnival-waltz epic "God Created Woman," "The Girl Who Made Me Sick," and the David Lynchian "No Woman's Flesh But Hers" (in which the narrator pledges his dedication to his comatose lover) are unlike any other music liable to be made this year. Though Dowd's demented take on country places an almost unbearably bleak emphasis on death, decay, and debilitating darkness, there's no doubting the power of his unique musical vision, especially as it's punctuated by his howls and moans of anguish. Canadian Fred Eaglesmith has been making music for a lot longer than Dowd, and his songwriting is not nearly as oppressive, but the two share iconoclastic tendencies. Like Dowd's gruff growl, Eaglesmith's yelp isn't necessarily the stuff of crossover success—and, also like Dowd, Eaglesmith reveals a taste for the Gothic, the bizarre, and the atmospheric. "Blue Tick Hound" and "Gettin' To Me" tackle rock and rockabilly, respectively, but the spooky effects and haunting lyrics are far more stylish than the usual bar-band fare. In fact, the weirder Eaglesmith gets, the better he is, as the junkyard blues of "Mighty Big Car" and the tango-till-you're-sore Tom Waits homages "Ten Ton Chain" and "Steel Guitar" comprise some of 50-Odd Dollars' many highlights.