Martin Sexton
Fall Like Rain
(Kitchen Table Records)
Rating: 3 out of 5 stars

Martin Sexton used to have a voice like an angel’s. But with more birthdays under his belt, he’s also developed a warmer, earthier tone. As his new EP, Fall Like Rain, conveys, he’s still got one of the prettiest, most soulful voices on the planet. It’s just a little more coffee-with-rich-cream than fluffy white clouds. Yet he easily manages to reach those clouds with his effortless falsetto, as he does in the title song.

In “One Voice Together,” Sexton delivers a message about peace and brotherhood with a beautiful gospel chorus — a chorus of one multi-layered voice, it turns out. Sexton handles all vocals throughout this five-song EP, as well as a good deal of the stellar guitar work. This track is one of three he co-wrote with Dan Mackenzie, who provides all manner of musical augmentation and produced the song.

Sexton visits his lower register on “Happy Anniversary (Six Years),” a sweet li’l mid-tempo love song with an inventive mix of mandocello and vocals, and lyrics that touch with gentle humor on the challenges and rewards of staying together. Taken with the tracks before it, it makes one wonder if Sexton has spent a lot of recent time listening to Jack Johnson and Ben Harper. There’s not a definitive resemblance, just a mood that suggests their influence.

Sexton takes on the downside of love on “Burlington,” a breakup song expressed without a hint of maudlin self-pity.

Sexton says he did an EP because he felt he had something to say now and didn’t want to wait. That helps explain his choice of closer, the Stephen Stills/Buffalo Springfield classic, “For What It’s Worth.” On this standout track, Sexton offers a bluesy, “unproduced” solo acoustic version of a song that somehow never gets old — or dated. And no, those aren’t redundant terms. “Old” refers to the song; “dated” refers to its message. Sadly, we still need to keep watching “what’s going down.” We need to keep paying attention, keep standing up against wrongs. And Sexton’s potent, completely non-anthemic version, sounds as if he could have pulled it straight from Stills’ bluesman soul. It's a great reworking of a song that's always worth hearing again.

Tim McGraw
Emotional Traffic
(Curb)
Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars

Perhaps history has trained us to expect ambitious statements or divisive stylistic turns whenever an artist touts any delayed record fraught with label controversy as their “best album ever.” While it’s hardly shocking that Tim McGraw’s eleventh studio outing bears little resemblance to a Yankee Hotel Foxtrot or Trans, the total absence of risk characterizing the otherwise-serviceable Emotional Traffic remains disappointing.

Shortly after its completion way back in late-2010, Curb Records shelved Traffic to prevent their most profitable star from racing to the end of his contract, resulting in an ongoing legal battle between the label and McGraw. In the midst of this tension and in the months leading up to the album’s prolonged release, quotes from McGraw declaring Traffic to be his greatest musical achievement began popping up in web ads.

While that title still belongs to McGraw’s 2007 benchmark Let it Go, the stadium-sized crescendos of opener “Halo” give an early impression that the Louisiana-native might have simply mistook his biggest work for his “best.” On the surface, it’s a polite power ballad--not far removed from the type of thing retainer-faced tweens sway along with at christian rock festivals. But the bombastic swells and hair-metal solos that elevate the track run contradictory to its vulnerable, self-pitying chorus: “I’ll crawl out of my cradle/down into my black hole.”

McGraw takes another stab at arena rock pathos on the man-out-of-time rally “I Will Not Fall Down.“ Though less strained than “Halo,” it’s impossible to ignore the team of celebrity songwriters (including the Warren Brothers and Martina McBride) wasted here on clunky slogans like “What they call ‘progress’ will never wait for me.“

Considering the introspective misfires, it’s telling that Traffic’s finest moments arrive when McGraw looks beyond himself toward the hardworking denizens of surrounding cars. See album highlight “The One That Got Away”: an affectionately rendered profile of an unshakable kid-chanteuse that may or may not be McGraw’s reply to Taylor Swift’s name-dropping 2007 single.

More than anything, the song serves as a reminder of McGraw’s unsung abilities as a storyteller, a talent which often goes overlooked in the face of his chart-devouring motivational ballads and crossover excursions. For perspective, note what happens when the singer attempts to pepper a sermon with blue collar vignettes on the religious anthem “Touchdown Jesus.” The hokey inspirational bits fall flat while the more character-oriented verses shimmer with populist charm, redeeming an otherwise saccharine throwaway.

Elsewhere, “Right Back Atcha Babe” and “One Part, Two Part” are breezy, bubblegum country tunes--if heard from a distance, indistinguishable from the countless other bubblegum country tunes that have found their way from the bottoms of McGraw’s boots to constant CMT-rotation throughout the past three administrations. Still, it’s unfair to fault a seasoned carpenter for sturdy construction: Traffic’s fluffier moments are, as usual, infectious and crowd-pleasing.

With that said, if McGraw wants to soft-close this record dueting with R&B star Ne-Yo on an obvious rehash of his hit 2004 collaboration with Nelly, why not? The lovely “Only Human” finds McGraw returning to the hip hop/country crossover party he more-or-less started to teach the bandwagon how it’s done. Jennifer Nettles, Jason Aldean and Willie Nelson would be advised to take note.

As previously stated, Emotional Traffic marks the end of McGraw’s career-spanning relationship with Curb Records. While not exactly the consummate work the singer advertised, it’s a solid departure bursting with enough potential singles to suggest that the most-played male artist of the last decade will continue to dominate country radio beyond his former label. Or as the man warns on the currently charting “Better Than I Used To Be” -- “I still got a few more dances with the devil.”

Leonard Cohen
Old Ideas
(Columbia)
Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

Leonard Cohen’s twelfth studio album in forty-four years opens curiously with a song titled “Going Home,” which both introduces Leonard Cohen as an artist and details the metaphysics of his own creativity. The man needs no introduction, of course: Everybody knows who Leonard Cohen is. We may not necessarily think of him as “a sportsman and a shepherd” or “a lazy bastard in a suit,” but we know the Canadian as a man with a physical voice so deep it sounds like a black hole and a lyrical voice so ominously Old Testament that his business card probably lists him as a singer-psalmwriter.

Stream Old Ideas In Its Entirety

But this insight into his process is a very different side of Cohen, one not often glimpsed in the past. “Going Home” is sung from the point of view of his own muse, a godlike figure who’s bemused by the artist/puppet at his command: “But [Leonard] does say what I tell him, even though it isn’t welcome,” says the demi-diety. “He just doesn’t have the freedom to refuse.” It’s a sneaky ploy, allowing Cohen to downplay his role in constructing his own tower of song while winking at his own lyrical cleverness. As an explication of his own artistic process, “Going Home” proves a fitting start to an album that balances levity with gravity, jarring straightforwardness with literary sleight of hand.

Like Dylan, Cash, and Philip Roth, Cohen has entered his 70s with renewed vigor and puckishness. His voice has grown deeper in recent years, which once seemed impossible, and while it has lost much of its former agility, it has taken on deeply etched textures that convey a sense of authority gained from experience. His years show through in every uttered syllable and sigh. And despite his advancing age and his recent financial troubles—he found himself nearly bankrupt after his former manager siphoned off millions of dollars—Cohen has over the past decade released a string of strong albums examining new facets of his evergreen themes: the sadomasochism of faith and love, the comforts and challenges of music, his place in this world as well as in the world beyond this world.

In some ways, Old Ideas comes across like a putting-his-affairs-in-order album, and it’s not his first. Of course, there’s always been a bit of Nebuchadnezzar in Cohen, who was an old man of 34 when he released his debut in 1968 and was even then singing about the ineluctable flow of time and the inevitable entropy of our physical selves. And yet, these new songs never grow repetitive, tedious, or dour, which is remarkable given the subject matter and his unchangeable tone of voice. The worst aspect of Old Ideas is that cover, which Cohen himself designed. The second worst is the backing vocals, although that could be said of almost all of his albums. The man has a weakness for female vocals, and here they sound a bit dated, like refugees from earlier in his career. And yet, they have the perhaps unintended effect of lightening these songs at least somewhat, of diffusing a least a bit of that darkness.

It’s remarkable, in fact, that it’s taken Cohen nearly half a century to write a song called “Darkness,” but it’s a sly number that only reveals itself as a blues after a few minutes of repetition and build. As he sings about oblivion and possibly VD, an acoustic guitar bleats out lewd chords and an organ thrums vigorously. Despite the constraints of his voice, these songs prove diverse and eclectic, with unexpected flourishes of sound to distinguish them: the spectral banjo and trumpet solo on “Amen,” the valedictory gospel piano on “Show Me the Place,” the lovely flamenco guitar that dances through “Crazy to Love You.”

Similarly, you barely notice just how much vocal range Cohen has, but there are erotic sighs and hipster-poet recitations, deep grumbles and resigned fades. At times, the songs trudge by at the same tempo and in the same mood, but it never grows tiresome or monochromatic. Cohen still entertains intense Biblical imagery, which at times barely skirts self-parody. “Tell me where you want your slave to go,” he incants on “Show Me the Place.” “Tell me again when the angels are panting and scratching at the door to get in,” he intones on “Amen.” “I’m naked and I’m filthy and there’s sweat upon my brow,” he sings on “Anyhow.” Depending on your threshold for grandiose thoughts about romantic and spiritual subjugation, Old Ideas wastes no time before soaring into the realm of the ridiculous.

Of course, that’s part of Cohen’s lasting appeal: He refuses to back away from any old idea, no matter how baroque or abstract. Perhaps more crucially, he has the tenacity to sing these songs in the present tense instead of the past. Old Ideas isn’t an album about reminiscing over younger days and youthful exploits, and Cohen isn’t packing his bags for the next world just yet. Instead, he comes across as a man still deep in the throes of religious and romantic upheaval, invigorated rather than intimidated by the nearness of death.

Phil Ochs: There But Fortune
PBS American Masters Presentation
Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

If this PBS documentary was just a beautifully compiled, expertly edited and painstakingly researched biography of Phil Ochs’ short but influential life, it would be required viewing for all lovers of American songwriting.

But it’s more.

Phil Ochs:There But for Fortune nimbly captures the politics and struggles of mid-late 60s America, a fractious but fascinating time in the country’s history. It deftly weaves rare with well known news and video clips to chronicle Ochs’ professional coming of age. Since the protest/social activist folksinger’s career was inextricably linked to those tumultuous times, this is as much a recap of that era as it is an unflinchingly detailed, warts and all examination of Phil Ochs’ rise and tragic fall, the latter punctuated by his 1976 suicide at age 35 after a losing battle with alcoholism and depression.

Although his early childhood years are covered, the bulk of the 90 minute program focuses on Ochs’ ascent to semi-fame as a New York City folksinger in the golden age of that genre. Interviews with peers such as Peter Yarrow, Ed Sanders (the Fugs), Joan Baez, Judy Henske, Pete Seeger and Tom Hayden, producer Van Dyke Parks and record company executives Jac Holzman and Jerry Moss, along with many others, provide fond, occasionally dark, often revealing memories of the ups and downs of Ochs’ life and career. He was a man driven not by fame or money, but to affect change in society. This came at a time when you needed a seat belt to hang on to the roller coaster headlines of civil rights, the Vietnam conflict, Watergate and the CIA’s influx into world politics.

Ochs was not only a convincing singer/songwriter with a firm grasp of melody and a distinctive boyish voice that yielded somewhat forgotten classics such as “I Ain’t Marching Anymore,” “The War is Over,” and “Outside of a Small Circle of Friends, but a high profile activist. He participated in the student demonstrations against the government during the Nixon period, putting himself in harm’s way to appear at now historical events such as the disastrous, riot filled 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago. He was also closely involved with the short-lived Yippie movement. His work in the early 70s supporting the Allende Chilean regime in association with folksinger Victor Jara and his subsequent world travels to the poorest, often most dangerous parts of international cities culminated in an African mugging that damaged his vocal chords. It was the beginning of a personal and professional downward spiral fueled by alcohol abuse and bipolar disease that the film deals with honestly and openly.

This is essential for anyone even vaguely interested in American history of the 60s, but more importantly, it’s a vital, riveting and long overdue documentary on one of the country’s finest, most dedicated and sadly forgotten singer songwriters.

(The PBS documentary premiers nationally on Jan.23)