Search - Jim Allen :: Straight Time

Gripping at times, mischievous at others, Jim Allen's second album is an eclectic blend of country, blues, folk, and rock that is distinguished by Allen's knack for eccentric but not too elliptical wordplay. On a haunting dirge like "To Keep You Warm," he conjures dark and vivid images of "winter in the headlights" and "frost from a prehistoric snow," and he juxtaposes French symbolist poet Charles Baudelaire and hard-bop trumpeter Thad Jones. His ocean-deep, gravelly baritone offers these inscrutable lines: "It's more bad news for Bill Monroe for 2Pac and his crew / It's Halloween for everyone but Christmas Eve for few." Eerie even before you realize that Bill Monroe and 2Pac died within a few days of each other in 1996. Next, Allen is off on a boozy stomp like "Billy Walsh Blues," or a funky romp like "B St.," "where all the dead men come to meet." Then there's a honky-tonk shuffle like "Don't Let Me Down" or a conjunto, called "Conjunto" of course, that begins inside a bottle of gin: "There are so many ways for a man to go wrong that you'll never number them all in a song / ...the winter will come to the weak and the strong." Chilling and thrilling, Allen's music recalls intelligent oddballs like Tom Waits and Leonard Cohen, but, like said oddballs, Allen is his own man. --Marc Greilsamer