Devils & Dust

Maybe the best way to get a handle on Devils & Dust is by process of elimination. In other words, it’s not a big band extravaganza with sax and piano fanfares for the common man. It’s not Human Touch or Lucky Town, both of which suffered from pick-up pros trying to play E Street shuffles, and as any fool knows, the only ones who can do that are the original Jersey shower. Nor is it the bleak and beautiful lunar landscape of America under the Republican gun a la Nebraska. It’s not Tom Joad either, although it does share some of those album’s attributes, namely a writerly rigour with regard to research and character development, plus a slew of wetback protagonists inhabiting southerly borders both geographical and moral.
What Devils & Dust is, is Bruce making a literate roots rock record without having to worry about where old friends like Clarence and Little Steven fit in. If anything, it sounds like the kind of record you’d expect from perennial New Bruces like Steve Earle or Joe Ely or Kathleen Edwards, heartland wood-stained tunes where sawing fiddles and lap steels rub comfortably against the boss-man’s Fender, all delivered by a team of players as efficient as they are unshowy. Special merit award goes to drummer Steve Jordan, hitherto best known as one of Keith’s X-Pensive Winos, whose hair-behind-the-beat shuffle (‘All The Way Home’, ‘Long Time Comin’’ and ‘Maria’s Bed’ all being lessons in how to splice swing with precision) affords Bruce a solid springboard on which to build his new Texarcana.
The songs are closely observed country noir vignettes, the testimonies of losers reaching a detente with the fates and promising to do better. There are bloodied but unbroken divorcees seeking dirty romance in roadside bars and waffle-houses. There’s ‘The Hitter’, a bare-knuckle pug mumbling along to a 3/4 tune from the same folk well Dylan got his ‘Hard Rain’. There’s the story of Rainey Williams, a black kid obsessed with cowboys who steals his mother’s boyfriend’s cash stash and lights out for Oklahoma. There’s the hair-trigger renegade of the title tune, who could be a refugee from Charlie Starkweather’s badlands, or George W drawing on himself in the bathroom mirror (“Now every woman and every man/They want to take a righteous stand/Find the love that God wills/And the faith that He commands/I’ve got my finger on the trigger/And tonight faith just ain’t enough/When I look inside my heart/There’s just devils and dust”). There’s Canned Heat blues in ‘All I’m Thinkin’ Bout’ and Tom Waits balladry in ‘Matamoros Banks’ and gospel of the gentlest sort in ‘Jesus Was An Only Son’. And in the no-illusions hotel room setting of ‘Reno’, a woman lays out the terms of the transaction: “Two hundred dollars straight in, two-fifty up the ass”. Later, she pours a whiskey and makes a toast to “the best you ever had” while her john laughs and ruminates to camera that it wasn’t even close.
This is where Bruce is at these days – a place of decency and disappointment, squalor and spirituality, nobody making any harsh judgements. The country of Jim Thompson as well as John Steinbeck. Or as Cormac McCarthy puts it in his forthcoming novel, no country for old men.