Johnny Dowd: The Pawnbroker's Wife

Johnny Dowd's music comes from a place where the Mason-Dixon line meets the rain-drenched streets of classic noir. His characters are fueled by booze and cigarettes, and have found uses for farm implements that would give most people nightmares. They know stories that can silence the noisiest roadhouse in the county, and sometimes they don't even live to tell them. Take the poor soul who narrates "True Love" from a grave in Tennessee: The quintessential Dowd hero, he found the love of his life and loved so hard that it killed him. After all, as the singer notes, "passion breeds suspicion," and sometimes suspicion isn't misplaced. Dowd's fourth album again pairs tales of woe to an unholy Tom Waits-like clatter, and again ranges from the simply scary to the movingly spectral. An album of broken families and unhappy holidays, The Pawnbroker's Wife keeps dropping references to Christmas that finally explode in a diabolical version of "Jingle Bells." Alone, it's as obvious as a punk-rock cover of a Carpenters song, but in context, it sounds as spooky as a Dowd original like "Billy Blu," in which a pitiable eccentric devises inventions to midwife an apocalypse. Though Dowd's voice always teeters on the brink of a tortured rasp even when it approaches Jimmie Dale Gilmore-style etherealness, he's equally effective when touching on less outré topics like the anti-capital-punishment anthem "Judgment Day" or the farmer's lament "Woody Guthrie Blues." The Pawnbroker's Wife frequently offsets Dowd's rage with the sweet backing vocals of Kim Sherwood-Caso. A virtual duet partner on several tracks, she spends much of the album drifting in the background, with a voice that promises redemption, damnation, or—as is only appropriate in Dowd's universe—some mixture of the two.