 Lost Dogs - Old Angel |
audiori 
Administrator
Registration Date: 05-27-2004
Posts: 1,383
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05-11-2010 21:08 |
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JR88
Moderator
Registration Date: 05-28-2004
Posts: 5,742
Favorite 77s album: 88
Location: Naperville, IL
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I will be asking for this and a few others for my birthday this year 
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05-17-2010 07:35 |
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Rod
Baby Elvis
Registration Date: 08-21-2005
Posts: 112
Favorite 77s album: When #s Get Serious
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It's mine, it's all mine! Spinning right now 
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05-17-2010 12:12 |
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Big Jim
Baby Elvis
Registration Date: 08-22-2005
Posts: 109
Favorite 77s album: Holy Ghost Building
Location: NJ
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| RE: Lost Dogs - Old Angel |
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Got my copy last night at the East Brunswick, NJ show I helped promote. My initial reaction is that this may be their best yet... Spun it once today, now spinning the Roe release I also picked up last night - nice stripped down acoustic vibe to these classic Roe/77's tunes.
It was great hanging with these guys last night too. Dean and Tami, the gracious hosts, simply did an incredible job with everything to make this happen and make it successful... I was grateful to be along for the ride and help promote the show...
Jim O'Dell
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05-18-2010 10:22 |
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Amadeus
Someone New
Registration Date: 12-05-2006
Posts: 28
Favorite 77s album: 77s (1987)
Location: Indiana
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Just got my copy today and CANNOT stop playing it; in a word - BRILLIANT!!! I agree with Jim that this may be their best yet and I can't wait to see them perform live (hopefully in Rensselaer, IN on July 2). I just caught Mike a few weeks ago in Fort Wayne and he sounded incredible; fantastic show and Mike was awesome!!!
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"To one without faith, no explanation is possible. To one with faith, no explanation is necessary" - St. Thomas Aquinas
"Every saint has a past; every sinner has a future" - Andrew Volpe
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05-19-2010 21:40 |
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Big Jim
Baby Elvis
Registration Date: 08-22-2005
Posts: 109
Favorite 77s album: Holy Ghost Building
Location: NJ
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Ok, here's my crack at a song by song review of "Old Angel" (warning - the write-up below is very wordy!) I love this CD and still think it is the best we have seen...
The Lost Dogs “Old Angel”
The Lost Dogs have managed to create a timeless masterpiece with their latest effort “Old Angel”. It’s a dog gone shame that it is not on a major label so that it may garner the recognition it truly deserves. One can hope that the buzz could help get this album out to everyone. Alas though, the road our fellow pilgrims have been traveling for several years now is a broken one, much like life, which brings me to the theme of this truly great CD. The Dogs Terry Scott Taylor, Mike Roe, Derri Daugherty and Steve Hindalong, sojourned down Route 66 during the waning days of summer 2008 and had an unforgettable time. The journey not only spawned much of the material on this CD, it will also give us a DVD documentary of their experiences in the near future.
On “Old Angel”, to these ears, Route 66 is more than just a great highway with a lot of history, an “exploration of the patchwork of Americana” to quote from the tune “The Glory Road”. On this CD, “America’s Highway” is also a very effective metaphor for life as a broken but glorious road. We are all fellow travelers, sometimes “broken and bruised, battered and used” (more lines borrowed, this time from the title track “Old Angel”), much like old Route 66. However, there is glory in that brokenness, as we submit to and are humbled by a Presence much greater than our brokenness. It is in fact that brokenness that helps lead us to that Presence or at least hopefully attain a greater appreciation.
We start out with “Israelites and Okies”. A tune of more lush instrumentation and vocals I have not heard. It is gorgeous and a great start to this epic CD. In introducing this song, Terry stated at the Lost Dogs concert I helped promote in May that Steinbeck made an apt comparison between the Israelites’ journey in the desert to the Promised Land, a land flowing with milk and honey, and the journey of the “Okies” to what was perceived to be their Promised Land, California, a land flowing with peaches and orange trees you could reach out and pluck from. “Israelites and Okies, may we all travel well”. As fellow travelers like the Israelites and the Okies, we can “travel this broken road, strapped to the mercy seat, paying strict and holy attention to the people we meet.” Sounds like a great life mission... “Dancing on the Devil’s Elbow” features some great fiddling work and Steve Hindalong playing the saw to great rhythmic effect! Possibly only Steve could “cut it” as a saw instrumentalist. This is a track that is great fun which tells a bit of the story of the town called “Devil’s Elbow, MO” (for more history, listen to the tune “Devil’s Elbow” from the Lost Dogs’ 2006 release “The Lost Cabin and the Mystery Trees”. This song portrays the fun of forgetting your cares and going dancing in Devil’s Elbow (“when the river gets to rising, nothing saves your skin like dancing on the Devil’s Elbow”). “Turn it Around” tells the story of the actual experience of the band traveling in a spooky area off old 66 and wishing to turn the RV around and high tail it out of there, which becomes a metaphor in the hands of Steve Hindalong who wrote the song, for listening to the voice of conscience inside which pleads with a man to do the thing that’s right and take the mother road out of there. Mike Roe sings and plays great on this one. “The Glory Road” is a bit of retooling of a song that was released by Taylor’s band Daniel Amos in 1995, but it fits really well on this CD too. Roe’s Duane-Eddy low style guitar sounds really great here too. I defy anyone to find another song out there that is packed with as much Route 66 Americana history. “America’s Main Street” is a bit of an intermission that gives Roe a chance to rock out and Taylor a space to verbally riff on Route 66 (“2,448 miles of sweet road, baby”). This is not the stand-out track on the album, but it is fun. “Traveling Mercies” is more or less of a traveling lullaby that Terry and Derri fleshed out, another really great tune.
Then, we come to a trilogy of beautiful and haunting dust bowl dirges, which for me, make for some of the best tunes on the album. “Dust in my Bowl” recounts the sad story of a family impacted by the dust bowl. “Dust in my bowl for breakfast, the end of my dreams for lunch, despair on my plate and for dinner I ate grapes of wrath, downed them all bunch by bunch”. We continue with “Pearl Moon (Hooverville Camp, 1932)”, which also tells the story of a family during dust bowl days who are stuck in a Hooverville camp, but who are hoping to get their jalopy started to move along down the road to something better. The pearl moon symbolizes the hope for something better, but like that moon, it proves to be elusive and unattainable. The story does not have a happy ending… “And our babies died” is repeated several times to end the song. This is a very haunting tune that will get under your skin. The final song in this trilogy of dust bowl dirges is “The World is Against Us”, a great a cappella tune that sees Derri, then Mike, then Terry singing the verses, with the entire band singing the last chorus. In the timeless lyrics of this song (when I first heard it in concert, I assumed it was an old Dust Bowl lamentation and not an original tune), you hear the desperation of a dust bowl farmer whose faith has been tested to the point where he wonders if he ever was walking down the road of faith to begin with. “The world is against us…and if God is too, let us lay down in the dust bowl and join the dust the wind blows… ‘cross the ruins of a sweet lie we once thought true”. Stunning lyrics…and here’s more that really gets me every time I hear it:
“…Who is man that thou art mindful?
Lord, what shall we do?
If your will is not to save us
But to banish and forsake us
Then our prayer for mercy’s wasted
In resisting You”
Wow… Terry definitely penned a classic with this one that will slay you when you hear it live.
On “Wicked Guns”, we get a history lesson about the exploits of Wild Bill Hickock courtesy of Steve Hindalong’s songwriting. This is another rocker, a fun song that tells the story of two incidents in the short life of this American legend of the Wild West. On “Goodbye Winslow”, we get treated to a tune which has a great 70’s vibe to it and indeed may include a nod to Jackson Browne and the Eagles, who once wrote that they were “standing on a corner in Winslow, Arizona”. In saying goodbye to Winslow, the Dogs write: “I won’t be standing on your corner waiting for my bad luck to end.” This great tune was crafted by Terry, Derri and Steve and contains some of the best lyrics on the album. To hear them and all the great tunes on this album, well, you just have to go and buy the thing, which by the way is at http://www.thelostdogs.com/store and is also now on iTunes! Back to the tunes.
On “Desert Flowers”, we get to hear a song that is very personal to the members of the band. During their Route 66 travels, the Lost Dogs visited the Red Sands Mission School, a Navajo reservation near Winslow, AZ, and connected with the children there. The “desert flowers” are the Navajo children and the Lost Dogs sing about how they were changed by that experience. This is a moving song, which includes some lessons in Navajo language as the phrase that means “They are loved” is repeated in the Navajo (dine) language throughout the song.
“Dead End Diner” may just be the song that is the most fun on this album. Remember the old folk song about someone being in the kitchen with Dinah (and Dinah on the railroad too)? Well, on this version, we get a treatment that is decidedly more modern day. This one will forever be time-stamped, since the first line of the song announces the setting: “Down at the dead end diner, Obama’s on the radio”…and it closes with that as well…as a customer tells the waitress “here’s my money” and “keep the change, honey”. In this version, Dinah is a 33-year old waitress who is looking for something better to come along and “dreams of leaving Tucumcari” to find “a California rich man she’ll meet and one day marry.”
“Carry Me” is another achingly beautiful tune penned by Choir and Lost Dogs mates Steve and Derri and sung beautifully by Mike.
As a finale to this master work, we have the title track “Old Angel” and it is indeed a grand finale. Written beautifully and poignantly by Terry, it tells the story of the “glory road”, Route 66, and all the sights she had seen in her day. Through this song, the road becomes something that is living and breathing - we can see through this metaphor how we in our day can take many things for granted and often look for the quickest road (i.e. the interstate) forsaking the joy that could be ours, instead of the scenic route, the road perhaps less traveled.
The scenic route is where the Lost Dogs started when they began their journey as a band back in 1991 and with “Old Angel”, they show they are still mining this territory, and better than ever. My prayer is that they continue to travel down this road for many years to come.
Jim O'Dell
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07-09-2010 21:46 |
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