What ‘Devils & Dust’ is, is Bruce making a literate roots rock record without having to worry about where old friend like Clarence and Little Steven fit in. If anything, it sounds like the kind of record you’d expect from perennial New Bruces like Steve Earle or Joe Ely or Kathleen Edwards, heartland wood-stained tunes where sawing fiddles and lap steels rub comfortably against the boss-man’s Fender, all delivered by a team of players as efficient as they are unshowy. Special merit award goes to drummer Steve Jordan, hitherto best known as one of Keith’s X-Pensive Winos, whose hair-behind-the-beat shuffle (‘All The Way Home’, ‘Long Time Comin’’ and ‘Maria’s Bed’ all being lessons in how to splice swing with precision) affords Bruce a solid springboard on which to build his new Texarcana.

The songs are closely observed country noir vignettes, the testimonies of losers reaching a detente with the fates and promising to do better. There are bloodied but unbroken divorcees seeking dirty romance in roadside bars and waffle-houses. There’s ‘The Hitter,’ a bare-knuckle pug mumbling along to a 3/4 tune from the same folk well Dylan got his ‘Hard Rain’. There’s the story of Rainey Williams, a black kid obsessed with cowboys who steals his mother’s boyfriend’s cash stash and lights out for Oklahoma. There’s the hair-trigger renegade of the title tune, who could be a refugee from Charlie Starkweather’s badlands, or George W drawing on himself in the bathroom mirror (“Now every woman and every man / They want to take a righteous stand / Find the love that God wills / And the faith that He commands / I’ve got my finger on the trigger / And tonight faith just ain’t enough / When I look inside my heart / There’s just devils and dust.”) There’s Canned Heat blues in ‘All I’m Thinkin’ Bout’ and Tom Waits balladry in ‘Matamoros Banks’ and gospel of the gentlest sort in ‘Jesus Was An Only Son’. And in the no-illusions hotel room setting of ‘Reno’, a woman lays out the terms of the transaction: “Two hundred dollars straight in, two-fifty up the ass.” Later, she pours a whiskey and makes a toast to“the best you ever had” while her john laughs and ruminates to camera that it wasn’t even close.

This is where Bruce is at these days – a place of decency and disappointment, squalor and spirituality, nobody making any harsh judgements. The country of Jim Thompson as well as John Steinbeck. Or as Cormac McCarthy puts it in his forthcoming novel, no country for old men.

One of Ireland’s foremost music and pop culture writers, Peter Murphy (b. 1968, Enniscorthy, Co. Wexford) got a taste for journalism at the age of 17 when he won first place in an EU sponsored competition for young essayists. After ten days of being wined, dined and chauffeured around Europe on someone else’s tab, the only proviso being that he file a report at the end of it, he figured this was the way to live. But first, he had to get the rock ‘n’ roll bug out of his system, and spent most of the next decade playing drums with a succession of bands. He quit music to become a journalist in 1996, quickly establishing himself as a senior contributor to Hot Press. Since then he has written over 30 cover stories for the magazine, accumulating a portfolio of interviews that includes Lou Reed, Patti Smith, Nick Cave, Willie Nelson, Radiohead, Public Enemy, Shane MacGowan, George Clinton, Sonic Youth, Television, Henry Rollins, PJ Harvey, Richard Hell, David Johansen, Warren Zevon, Wim Wenders, Iain Banks, Will Self, William Gibson, Billy Bob Thornton, FW De Klerk and many others. His work has also appeared in the Bloodaxe Books anthology Dublines, the Sunday Independent (Ireland) plus international publications such as Rolling Stone (Australia) and Request (US). Miscellaneous assignments include writing the programme notes for jazz legend Miles Davis’ art exhibition hosted by the Davis Gallery in Dublin (2000), collaborations with cult author JT LeRoy for the American magazine Razor (2002), and co-producing Revelations, a two-hour radio documentary about The Frames (2003). He is frequently employed as a rent-a-mouth by the BBC and Irish national radio and television, is a contributor to the online archive Rocksbackpages.com and more recently gave a talk entitled Nocturnal Emissions at the ReJoyce symposium in the National College of Ireland, tracing the influence of James Joyce’s writings on Irish music. He has also been invited to contribute an essay to the liner notes of the 2004 remastered edition of Harry Smith’s Anthology Of American Folk Music, and is currently writing his first novel.

© 2005 Laura Hird All rights reserved.