It’s not the destination but the journey, as folks say. Hell & Back, the latest release from Matthew Dickson, leads us up to a fine vantage point to overlook what has been, career-wise, a long and consistently interesting trail. It is a perfect cross-section of Dickson’s sound: covering all the bases and fine-tuning what has come before.
Following up last year’s beautiful, fairly stripped-down folk effort Moonshiner, Hell kicks up the volume and calls in the band for a swinging meander through Dickson’s slowly solidifying soundscape.
And swing this thing does. A rollicking statement on, and meandering appraisal of, the life of a showman and wandering soul. Hell has a sense of motion to it, from the first track to last: performers trying to make it back to the stage; Romeo’s seeking out the shadow of their old love; mystics chasing their own words home; characters who “go walking after midnight, whilst others ride the rails”. This steady movement is aided by the endless path of sonic variation. Dickson has managed to instill his own voice into such a plethora of musical ‘genre’ that he can switch from one to the next without pulling you out of the atmosphere of the record – a sequencers dream. Across the seven tracks the tone switches something around five times. At one turn country, the next blues, on into something folky now and twisting into a crescent of grunge-laden rock ‘n’ roll the next.
The production of Roscoe Wilson must also take a fair share of the credit. Guitars are exquisitely layered, the drums step-up but never step-on, the pops of banjo, lap-steel or guiro slip in perfectly to add a little texture to each track. There is also an undeniable warmth to the whole record, particularly Dickson’s vocals, coming through clean and perfectly poised. The Dickson/Wilson pairing has been working together for some time now and is growing finer with each record.
The soul of this collection may lay within the track Lost Trails. A meandering, mystical musing on life. The swinging folk infused rocker sums up the yearning for place, the wanting for something to hold on to, the plea for a somewhere to settle, that permeates Hell and Back. Here is the struggle of knowing that something more is out there but lingering, somehow, just beyond reach: “I’ve never ever saw the bird fly, but I know that it has flown”. That push and pull hovers over the record, the struggle of being torn between the comfort of the old and the pleasure of the new.
Of seven incredible tracks, however, the literal center piece of the record, Pinot Noir, may be the knockout. A stunningly classic-sounding country song that feels ageless. It is the tale as old as country-music time. A broken-hearted man resigning himself, and succumbing to, the embrace of every country songwriter’s first love: The Bottle. “Here’s to my only friend” the narrator sighs as they empty another, watching on as the shadow of the woman who “never descended to a fool such as I” fades through the doorway. There are few who have managed to capture in song the pain and pure high-lonesome ache of real heartbreak and make it ring universally true. Patsy Cline’s single, lonely cigarette comes instantly to mind, or Dean asking the man behind the bar for the jukebox, or of course Nelson’s blue eyes crying. I would put Pinot Noir in the same jukebox and happily spend my quarters. This is country music as it should be. Perfected, bottled, ready to comfort the next heartbroken fool.
And then we have Devil Deville. A J. Mascis-esque guitar stomping heavily upon Buddy Holly’s rock ‘n’ roll glasses, terrorizing the squares in the dance hall. This, we must assume, comes shortly after the return from the inferno of the title. We are back, with flames still licking at the boots. A brutal, rocking, fuck-it-all-give-me-the-escape rock ‘n’ roll number. It is a thrilling and refreshing switch up in the Dickson catalogue. And, in these times, who can argue with a want to throw it all out and run: “My Devil Deville come take me away…come lead me astray”. It’s the kicker. It’ll drag you off that bar stool and make you want to twist, in the most demonic of ways.
Dickson, whether rocking or rolling, has an incredible skill for painting such images with a cinematic scope. Deville of course, lands the imagination on that dirty, demonic dancefloor. The sticky floor we have all, at least once, desperately grasped at a wrong lover upon. The aforementioned Lost Trails brings to mind both a dusty epic of souls meandering across city streets seeking succor and saviour, and a haunting track playing scratchily from the old radio in the background of some early black and white Jarmuschian flick. Track two, Shadowboxing ‘neath the Moon, both sonically and lyrically takes you into the folky, mystical world that Dickson seems to find comfort in. “I was blinded by my legs, running by themselves, when you felt the sun coming on”.
Songs such as Shadowboxing ‘Neath the Moon have been appearing more regularly in the songwriter’s work, perhaps acting as an escape when the toll becomes too heavy. A beautiful repast, or a breather to disappear out of the brutal reality of life and into a land where there is a break from the torrent of being alive: “Your voice was always by my side, it gave me pleasure through the ride, how it pounded into every moment of life beneath the storm”. The song is lifted by the exquisite banjo-picking of Garry McFadden (of The Daddy Naggins), adding the lilts and tilts that carry the song along down the river under that silver moon.
Rosethorn, sitting second to last in the order, is a wonderful song of love and loss, country-tinged and carried through with poetry that sings with the echoes of the Romantics. There is the major chord lift of the love and then the fall into the minor chord of heartbreak. The focus, however, lays upon the beauty of that first love and a refusal to let the ending tarnish what was once there: “We have travelled too long to look back at where it all went wrong”. The major lift, not the minor fall.
Dickson closes us out with the rambling, meandering 100 Day Blues. Again, a voyage to seek some sort of comfort or belonging. It is reminiscent of Dylan’s Highlands in its tone of searching. We follow the narrator as they seek somewhere to lay their head. The home they knew is no longer home, the crossroads are layered with questionable magic, and rattlesnakes linger in the dirt. When rest is found, it is found trapped in a shack between a locked back door and a mangy guard dog at the front. We’re wrapped up in the quandary of the whole record: should I stay, or should I go? Where, exactly, is home now in this world. Do I even have a choice?
You may wish for bigger ears to accommodate the sweep of this record. Traces weave throughout of the singer-songwriter of the Nick Drake ilk, the rock ‘n’ roll of Berry or Buddy, the country of Cline, the folk of Pentangle, the currently incomparable blend of all that which has come to sum up Matthew Dickson. He strolls gently through, cherry-picking the fruits of whichever field he fancies to whisk them off in his gunny sack with recipes in mind.
We are lucky to have him, crafting stories that can at once carry us far away and take us home. There is so much to enjoy here. The title track poses the question: what reason can there be to keep on fighting just to go to hell and back? If this is what that journey looks like, there’s plenty reason to take another trip.
