Austin Sound

James McMurtry’s newest release “Just Us Kids” is more of what you’d expect from the increasingly acerbic good-ol’-rocker-hippie, which is to say that his latest album is a tightly composed, melancholic ode to the working lonely and an incensed rant against the mendacity-filled pigfucker politicos of the W. Bush administration. The American Dream has croaked and McMurty was there to witness its last raspy breath, next to some train tracks in what could be any has-been American factory town.

McMurtry’s outrage with the nation’s current political path is palpable throughout the album, and nowhere is it more obvious than on the track “Cheney’s Toy,” a searing condemnation of the Boy President and his Iraqi war of adventure. The song opens hauntingly, referencing the unknown emotional casualties of our post-traumatic-stressed troops and continuing to characterize the commander-in-chief as a child searching in all the wrong places for mommy and daddy’s love. The song loses its effect to some extent though in the refrain, where Bush is characterized as, no surprise given the title, “Cheney’s toy.” It’s an unfortunate image, trivializing to some extent the song’s more powerful imagery of shell-shocked troops and a small, scared, ill-prepared president. Far more effective both politically and musically are more subtle tracks like “Freeway View” and “Fire Line Road,” which reference the better times gone by and imply the political disasters of the past eight years in an eloquence that comes only from telling an individual’s story. All three songs, and indeed the entire album, are the logical inheritance of McMurtry’s earlier W. condemnation “We Can’t Make It Here.”

Established McMurtry fans will instantly recognize the chunky-but-never-clunky guitar rhythms of songs like “Bayou Tortous” and “God Bless America (Pat MacDonald Must Die)” and “The Governor,” but the album as a whole is not as heavy on the hard-driving, hard-rocking, wall-knocking tracks that have frequented his past albums, such as the frantic, meth-inspired “Choctaw Bingo” that McMurtry is known for and that regularly rattles the walls at the Continental Club during his Wednesday night gigs.

But what the album lacks in barn-burning rock it more that makes up for with heart-wrenchingly composed and performed tales of regular folk, a genre that McMurtry has become a master of and that achieves its height on this album with the title track, “Just Us Kids.” The song’s piano accompaniment will make your blood chill and your heart whimper. “Just Us Kids” is a monument to small town desperation and faded dreams, the kind of song McMurtry was born to write, along with tracks like “Hurricane Party” and “Ruby and Carlos,” which tell poignant stories as artfully as they can be told.

I will leave it to McMurtry himself to explain the albums two parenthetical fatwas, which read “Pat Macdonald Must Die” and “Leonard Cohen Must Die.” I’m sure there’s a story in each of them, but I haven’t figured them out yet, distracted as I was by McMurtry’s consistently melancholy voice and the glimpses into the lives of people we all know but whose stories would never be told if it weren’t for artists like James McMurtry.

Websites:
www.jamesmcmurtry.com
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