Pictures From Life's Other Side

"If rock 'n' roll was a religion, I'd be a preacher in need of a church."

AND YOU shall know him by his trail of dead.

Johnny Dowd is the middle aged co-owner of a New York-based haulage company. In his spare time, he makes records about sin, guilt, dementia and snuffing people. His friends say he's a regular guy. This, his second album, is akin to a liquid breakfast with Captain Beefheart, Tom Waits, 16 Horsepower and The Black Heart Procession, all taking turns at reading from Ted Hughes' Crow.

Dowd forages around the fringes of psycho country, recycling the kind of mangled percussion parts and sexually abused guitar sounds other artists might toss in the studio dustbin, all the time singing in a laconically off-colour whine somewhere between William Burroughs and Deputy Dawg.

The opening title tune, based on a vintage Hank Williams lyric, is the most orthodox thing on show. Elsewhere, amongst the 'Jambalaya' and 'Crosscut Saw' references in a tune like 'Worried Mind', Dowd processes Kim Sherwood-Caso's backing vocals until they sound like the testimony of a murdered girl being channeled through a clairvoyant.

Much of the album recalls Green On Red's mid-'80s forays into the heart of the trailer park nightmare, except far uglier and more abstract, with fractured (ar)rhythms, the odd hunk of carny paraphernalia and some great Marc Ribot-like shapes from the man himself.

Further on in, 'Hope You Don't Mind' is a stalker's valentine to that object of his obscure desire ("I followed you home from school/I hope you don't mind . . . I looked in your window last night/I hope you don't mind") and 'God Created Woman' is plain hysterical ("You knew Cain, you knew Abel/Your sister was Jezebel/Your love is no gift from heaven/Your love is a dog from hell").

The people in Johnny Dowd's head waltz around the parlour with long-dead sweethearts mummified in dusty wedding dresses. They drive pick-up trucks through town with cadaver parts stuffed in the beer cooler on the passenger seat. They sit up late at night in front of a flickering TV, sucking on a revolver and waiting for the steel plate pain in the forehead to stop.

Pictures From Life's Other Side is a blue hell of a record.