Michael J Sheehy & The Hired Mourners: Don't We Deserve Some Kind Of Love? (Dimple Discs - Vinyl, CD, Digital Download)
When an album opens with the line "Stitches burst," it proves a perfect introduction to a raw and tender enterprise, the dark sides of songs. It is also the first effort in decades when not a drop of alcohol passed the singer Michael J Sheehy's lips. "Like Blood On Snow," the tune in question, glides along via a ghostly shimmering of guitar akin to an incidental sequence from a David Lynch vista; a semi-spoken vocal painting a unique impressionistic melancholy.
It is followed by "Full Moon, Empty Belly," which could be the late Lee Hazlewood in elegant cahoots with the mannered miseries of Chris Isaak, but with a playful skip in its steps of raw and reflective honesty.
"My wounds are deep and fresh
The mirror becomes a razor
And I carve away my flesh
I lean into the hunger
I lean into the fear
And I lean into the darkness
Till I disappear"
The ghost of Bill Fay casually haunts at his gossamer best the delicately graceful "Don't Put Yourself Beyond The Reach Of Love." A lightness of touch presides, unafraid in slow piano perfection, there, but almost not, whilst delivering an emphasis and yearning. eloquently understated by a casually refined vocal.
"And it's okay to be frightened
And it's okay to cry
It's okay to lose yourself sometimes
But don't let love pass you by"
"You Better Take Everything" possesses that dour hymnal aspect of David Ackles in what it choses to discard. a lo-fi confection from the "less is more" school of sparse nonchalance that Mickey Newbury perfected as sparse fragility. A song for the perpetually dispossessed, with aching strings and a mannered sorrowing.
"Every empty promise
Every moment of doubt
Every word I choked on
Before I could spit them out"
Like a slow dance, "Pure Deep Water" uses such a motif, a neat act in encompassing dangerous space whilst never overcrowding it. A kind of mystic perfection, "Only Drinking In My Dreams" is a hymn for the last dregs of a departing evening as tables are cleared and shutters rattle closed. It slithers like an insidious snake within the mind of listeners with neat brevity and dark humour.
"My car won't start
And my favorite porn star
Is born again
I'm out here alone
The whole world is stoned
And I need a friend"
The nifty "If Had Known It Was The Last Time" could in another life become a neatly deft cabaret ballad, but it neatly vanishes into the thinnest air just as it has accosted one's attention. A deft beguilement. Playful lushness attends "The Left Hand Don't Need To Know." A keening element of professed grief accompanied by a deft beguilement of violin implicit of darkness falling as mist settles across heads of purple heather.
"So, keep your actions pure
Without thought for reward or show
And if your right hand
Does a good thing
The left hand don't need to know"
"Don't We Deserve Some Kind Of Love" tugs at the heart in the poetic fashion of early Tim Hardin. clipped and archly bare, here is a song that Morrissey should steal, and hopefully shall.
"The damaged and the broken
The mighty and the small
The heathens who have
Seen and done most everything
And the holier than thou
Who've done nothing at all"
The closing bow arrives as "Tiny Blessings," a wry and rueful madrigal reminiscent of the deceptively lugubrious Jake Thackray. Precise, concise and effortlessly assured, it never overstays its sense of welcome.
"Always count your blessings
Even when you're feeling blue
Try to smile and remember
Someone is hurting more than you"
Full-bodied clarity, rendered in reflective maladies, raw but beautiful and never depressing, despite a somber cloaking. Carried aloft by subtle songcraft, these ten tracks gift a seemingly longer, more involved journey, a sure indication of reflective time well spent, milled and presented as a seamless stitching of disparate shadows.
Sobriety embraced and personified as brave defiance.
A tendering enterprise of considered exposure and expulsion