Cards on the table, Dear Reader. “Tropical Depression” is Jordie Lane’s fourth album. I’ve not heard the other three, but the five minutes and 13 seconds of “Back, Out There” is enough to suck you into his world.
Stream of consciousness. Bob Dylan after reading James Joyce for days while doing acid. It’s all here. It’s glorious.
If that’s more cosmic than country, then he’s proper country on “Biscuit House” or “The Changing Weather” but always with a caveat. There’s always a swirl of psychedelics. The way “….Weather” ends, for example, there’s just an air of weirdness.
All of this makes the acoustic “Empty Room” with its classic feel, a little more of a surprise than it might be, and Lane’s voice is perfect for it too.
“Different Worlds” is another to be filed under “proper troubadour” stuff, and that’s what makes Lane so good.
He’s clever, he’s original, but even though he takes “Friends” in a real Elliott Smith-type direction, what he does is always rooted in the classic.
“Blame Me If You Want To”, like a number of them, with its wonderful use of instrumentation, seems to come from a place of real pain. “I don’t wanna be lonely, just don’t wanna die young” he sings on “It Might Take Our Whole Lives”, the working class struggle is laid bare. Always hoping for better. Dreaming of finding it.
There’s something light and airy about “Internal Dialogue” but the lyrics are anything but, that’s true of “New Normal” too, as it deals with the aftermath of COVID-19.
He is one of those artists who finds a way to write songs differently without ever being forced or “Wacky”. “Been Lucky” is a case in point. The character in the song – and maybe it’s Lane, knows luck ain’t on his side.
On “….There” he offers this, which made me smile: “Yeah I’ll pay a publicist, everything I got, It’ll be so damn beautiful they’ll get me on some underground Norwegian blog’. And whilst I’d point out that MV is a website, not a blog, I get the point.
I mean, sound, my reviews might not carry the weight of one of the ones he got on Rolling Stone, but nonetheless, “Tropical Depression” is supremely original, supremely well done and supremely good.
Step on board for a totally Tropical taste, as the old Lilt ads used to say.
Rating 8.5/10
