Cowboy Junkies - All That Reckoning

The Quietus

The obvious response to the 30th anniversary of the release of Cowboy Junkies’ still-mesmerizing milestone The Trinity Session would have been for them to repeat 2007’s Trinity Revisited, this time with a remastered package and a series of gigs with the record played in full. Instead, this wonderfully idiosyncratic band has elected to move always-forward with an album that’s every bit as wonderful as the collection that first brought them to our attention.

All That Reckoning is an album that more than lives up to its title, for here Cowboy Junkies take stock of the political, social and personal situations that add up to that great big thing called life in the 21st century. It’s all here as relationships within the context of love are juxtaposed against the result of hate and anger aimed at those we’ve never met, while nation states go through a form of deep, existential analysis and examination.

And through it all is Cowboy Junkies’ trademark sound of stark and often fragile roots music that’s frequently bolstered through a prism of discordant noise that reaches out towards the blurred yet kaleidoscopic vision of psychedelia. Expertly and deftly delivered with a combination of subtlety and harsh surprises, this is a band that has lost none of its ability to beguile.

At the centre of it all is Margo Timmins’ ever-stunning voice, here infused with the weight of life and experience. Straddling sensuality and betrayal, it’s impossible not to sit up and take notice as she sings, “I’d wake with my heart so full of you/And then I found this bed was poison” on opener ‘All That Reckoning (Part 1)’. And when she welcomes us to “the world of dissolution” on ‘When We Arrive’, there can be little mistaking where this album is headed.

The playing throughout by guitarist Michael Timmins, drumming brother Peter and bassist Alan Anton is exquisite throughout as it rises from a whisper to a scream and then back again. In tandem with Margo’s haunting voice, songs such as ‘Shining Teeth’ are imbued with a tenderness and tension that should be at sharp odds with each other, yet instead compliment and blend into a unified whole.

Credit must be given to their guest musicians, too, most notably Bill Dillon’s guitar work on the stunning ‘Missing Children (The Tyger)’. His instrument is a snarling beast that, in lesser or more excitable hands, would overwhelm and dominate but here, kept in a tight leash, stands guard over William Blake’s source material.

That Cowboy Junkies are still making music this far down the line is to be applauded. That it ranks with the very best of their material deserves nothing less than an ovation.

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The Guardian 60

(Proper)

It’s 30 years since Canada’s Cowboy Junkies created the template for alt-country on their second album, The Trinity Session, a hushed reimagining of rock and bluegrass standards and their own funereal songs. Much has changed in the intervening decades – they were dropped by Geffen in 1998 and haven’t recorded for a major label since – but the band’s faith in rootsy sounds is unwavering, as their first LP in six years illustrates. It finds the Junkies in meditative mode, revisiting their past and searching for connections in a callous, superficial world. “I don’t want to see your shining teeth/ Show me your bruised and battered heart,” sings Margo Timmins on the standout, Shining Teeth, a spare tale of anguish steeped in violent imagery.

Musically, too, there are tempestuous moments (Missing Children; Sing Me a Song), but the quartet only soar when the lights are dimmed and ambience takes precedence over energy. Full of yearning (“If we could just sit on those wooden stairs again”), the lovely Wooden Stairs pairs a shimmering guitar with Timmins’s plaintive voice, resulting in a record that is delicate, undemanding, but never too cosy.