Chapter 10 - Cowboy Junkies - Open

Chapter 10 

Today i think we'll do two more albums, but only because they are coincidentally linked to each other through no fault of my own. Enya and Tom Waits were bizarrely linked together by copyright lawsuits, so naturally today's pair are linked by admiration for each other. I'll go ahead and spoil the surprise, Lou Reed once said that Cowboy Junkies' version of Sweet Jane was his personal favorite. It should also be lost on no one that Lou Reed is an underbelly icon and Cowboy Junkies have a female lead singer. The coincidences just keep on rolling, don't they? 

Now, my brain is for some reason ill-equipped to understand the name Cowboy Junkies as a Canadian Alt-Country band like wikipedia tells me they are. I just instinctively want them to be a Texas based Al Jourgensen Industrial Rock side project like Revolting Cocks. I don't know why, i'm just complicated like Sunday morning butchering chickens, i guess. They have a gig at The Cabot in Beverly Massachusetts on the 23rd and a few gigs in Great Britain in November, then off to New Zealand in Jan. 2023. Impressive approaching 40-year career for the Timmons siblings trio + another dude. For comparison, Hanson is still thriving at 30 years, and Greta van Fleet has officially survived a full decade. Spirit still holds the copyright for "the family that plays together," but A) that was step-dad and son, B) they broke up, and Blind Mice) just like Carpenters, there were only two of them. Cowboy Junkies win, i guess. 

Believe it or not, Open is a concept album about the concept of "open," and the venus fly trap on the cover is intended to be both literally open, and also ominously open because how else would they trap those unsuspecting flies? You might say the concept of "open" is open to interpretation. Well, at the risk of 'sploding that brain cell i bottled that Creed song up inside, let's give it the ears wide open listen it deserves. I want it to be more Stabbing Westward than a Drive By Truckers lighter ballad, but i guess we're probably going to split the difference with some kind of Mazzy Star/Dishwalla collaboration. 

Wowzers that's an opening couplet. That one i won't spoil, i'll let you be as disturbed as i was. I Did It All For You is more like Poe and Chelsea Wolf decided to scare the crap out of everyone. This is daaaaark and distuuuuuurbing. Love it, absolutely love it. The rest of the album could totally be crap and i wouldn't care at all because daaaamn. 

Hey look at that, just like Rush we get a later part of a larger group of songs spread across multiple albums (Weapon from Signals was actually part II of Fear). 

K, these first 2 tracks aren't like any random tracks i've heard from Cowboy Junkies. It's more Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds than anything, but mostly it makes Chelsea Wolf sound completely derivative. I'm drooling, that's how good this is. 

Bread and Wine breaks the spell, but even in a major key there's something slightly off kilter. You could definitely call it Alternative Country, but it's still noisy and it absolutely rocks in a totally depressing, the world is not ok kind of way, a bit like how Mark Lanegan was a bit paranoid delusional about 5G, but after his nasty bout of covid induced coma said he would definitely be getting a booster shot when they became available. He died 02/22/2022. The amount of coincidence in this run of albums is starting to get creepy, still no cause of death has been reported, but he died at his home in Ireland. 

I don't have proper words for this, it defies all genres by being all genres at the same time; downer alt-rock, psychedelic blues, a dissonant mandolin for no comprehensible reason. What i do know is that i am totally enthralled, and that we definitely went on a journey. 

Or did we? We end with the noisy feedback solo that starts the album, so did we really just circle back and go through it all again? Is Close My Eyes actually the prologue? 

Spectacular.

Chapter 11