The Ghost of Tom Joad Review

The intent is honourable and the research is real. These songs come out of newspaper reporting about the border, methamphetamine cooks in California, families sleeping in a storm drain, and he treats the material with total seriousness. Youngstown is the best of them, a history of a steel town told through four generations, and it became a fierce electric showpiece on stage precisely because the album version has nowhere to go.

That is the problem. Almost everything is sung in the same low, careful, tuneless register, the arrangements barely move, and after five tracks the ear stops distinguishing one story from the next. Nebraska worked because the melodies were strong and the performances had a wildness under the hiss. This is more literate and much less alive. Straight Time and Sinaloa Cowboys have good writing in them. As an album to sit with, it asks for a great deal of patience and gives back a very narrow band of feeling.