The Pine Valley Cosmonauts: The Executioner's Last Songs, Vol. 1

Death and taxes might be life's two inevitabilities, but great songs about death outweigh great songs about taxes by a healthy margin. The Executioner's Last Songs—featuring Jon Langford's crack country band The Pine Valley Cosmonauts, backing what's becoming a stock company of performers—compiles nearly two dozen songs about death in an attempt to call attention to what all involved perceive to be a serious misuse of taxes: the death penalty. Proceeds benefit the Illinois Death Penalty Moratorium Project, directing attention to the state whose now-endangered suspension of the death penalty, and subsequent freeing of wrongfully convicted death-row inmates, has made it the center of the debate over capital punishment. Recognizing that art reaches deeper than propaganda, Last Songs directly addresses that debate only once, letting its songs tell their stories on their own. Of these, only a handful even deal with the death penalty, and those that do come from as far afield as Waco Brother Dean Schlabowske's cover of The Adverts' "Gary Gilmore's Eyes" and Jenny Toomey's take on the Cole Porter standard "Miss Otis Regrets." There's a lot of liveliness amidst the doom and gloom, thanks in large part to the inspired pairings. Steve Earle brings the darkness out of "Tom Dooley," but most of the guests tap into the material's rich vein of dark humor. After all, what's the point in helping, in Langford's words, "the long civilizing march against the death penalty," if there's no time to joke about it