As it cuts loose the pretension that often dulls music about death, Johnny Dowd's fifth album, Cemetery Shoes, manages some unexpectedly mesmerizing moments.
The black-and-white cover bears a dreary photograph of the gray-haired artist standing amid tombstones and crunchy leaves.
It is a deceptive image because the music is actually feverish, funny and more welcoming than the Tom Waits albums that inspired it.
Dowd has the voice of a comic movie actor playing a religious revivalist, and his slurred and uncertain accent tells stories without a trace of self-pity.
The songs beat back our overwhelming fear of mortality and make it manageable from a distance. Death is turned into a circus that equalizes saints and sinners, and Dowd's dark performances cast him as another one of his everyday crazies.
In emphasizing the absurdity of the American landscape, Dowd revitalizes familiar themes with a wicked guffaw. But, in order to reject all seriousness, he is also too insistent on writing like a bad beatnik poet.
He is never emotionally lucid enough to really shock the listener like the slyly great fiction writer he seemingly wants to be.
The album's best songs radiate a mischievous heat, and a handful of them are spellbinding accounts of murder and suicide.
The mood approaches the cinematic. You can picture the dance of the dead upon the hill in Ingmar Bergman's "The Seventh Seal," or, more accurately, its satire in Woody Allen's "Love and Death."
The opening track is the marvelous funeral march "Brother Jim," which makes humorous shifts from verses about a clerical killer to the redemptive gospel chorus.
"Wedding Dress" is a convincing first-person narrative of a transgendered character haunted by memories of his father's masculinity and his marriage.
But at only 36 minutes long, the album is inconsistent, and Dowd's imagination lacks stamina. Even some of the most amusing songs are built on the clich
