McCann Can
This year’s Bob Dylan record, Modern Times, dropped with the usual baby boomer fawning. As Ron Rosenbaum has written in the New York Observer, this praise has been more hot air for an artist whose musical genius has diluted with each year post-1976. With Modern Times, Dylan sounds like the Cookie Monster parodying Tom Waits songs with a solid but bland bar band. It ain’t pretty. Or terribly interesting. Yet the critics coo softly, as Rosenbaum contends, fetishising Dylan’s rootsy authenticity.
And while your understanding of rootsy authenticity is probably different from your neighbour’s, it seems uncontroversial to suggest that rawness is part of the roots deal. If so, James McCann is a man who, in 2006, can surpass The Great Bob as a purveyor of authentic roots and blues.
- James McCann
- Knowing Smile
- from Where Was I Then
On his debut record, Where Was I Then, McCann brings the blues raw and pretty unadorned. It’s blues besotted by the drunken hedonism of rock, to be sure—we’re a long way from Leadbelly here—but it’s recognisably roots-based and knows a thing or too about the tradition.
“Knowing Smile” opens the record with the set’s catchiest moments. A slide guitar moans in an upper-register throughout the song, swimming in a sea of reverb and distorted to unnatural bouts of sustain. It’s the most prominent feature of a song otherwise muddy in its tones: the guitar soars where the band does its best trade in Neil Young & Crazyhorse-style lowdown rock; unobtrusive but important for its contrast, like a stout man standing next to Luc Longley.