The last of the hardcore troubadours?
When you’re a kid you swear it’ll never happen. You swear that you’ll keep up with modern trends and will never look blankly like your dad did when you bored him with some brand new band you’d got in to in the late 80s.
To that end, MV will admit something.
Dear reader, we’d precisely no idea who Danny Worsnop was when this arrived in the inbox. Maybe we should have known about Asking Alexandria, maybe we should have known something about We Are Harlot, or about his battles with alcoholism and drugs, but there we are.
On the plus side of all this, of course, is we have no preconceived ideas of what he should sound like, only what he does sound like.
And to that end, “The Long Road Home” is absolutely superb.
A sort of country blues collection, it also understands a pop hook when it needs one and the construction of these songs is shot through with a skill that few in this area can match.
Take the first two songs. “Prozac” (the album was originally slated to be called “The Prozac Sessions”) lays bare his struggles with addiction and is dark, but the second, “Mexico” is a good time rocker, which sees him “sippin’ on somethin’ chilly” (which he rhymes with “jammin’ on Willy” as if it’s the most natural thing on the planet) and in the process is better than anything than on the rather limp effort from The Cadillac Three which emerged last year.
Largely that sets the pattern for the record. Roughly split between knowing bad boy stuff like “I Feel Like Shit” – think David Allan Coe’s “Time Off For Bad Behaviour” turned up to 11 – and more confessional material, it gets the balance just about perfect.
“Anyone But Me” has number one in the country charts written all over it – no mean feat for a kid in his mid-20s from East Yorkshire – but better still is the brilliant “High” which is fragile and proof that the darkest hour, ain’t, to quote Black Stone Cherry, always before the dawn. Both are real highlights.
Even the more throwaway stuff like “I Got Bones” works, and it does so because Worsnop understands rock n roll and catchy choruses are the order of the day. “….Home” is better, though, when it is exploring emotions as on “Quite A While” and there’s even a stab at proper old time country with “Don’t Overdrink It.”
But whatever it does, there is nothing that “The Long Road Home” doesn’t do well. “I’ll Hold On”, for example is reminiscent of Shooter Jennings, while “Midnight Woman” broods before shaking off the shackles for one last hook – and the use of backing vocals here gives the song a rather epic feel. “Same Old Ending”on the other hand finds him in reflective mood: “it’s just like I remember it, with a little more resentment” he offers, and there is not much light at the end of this particular tunnel. The closing “The Man” has a similarity or two with “The Devil Went Down To Georgia” but is great fun and a fine conclusion to one of the biggest surprises of 2017.
Steve Earle has a biography written about him called Hardcore Troubadour, and in it, it is contended that Earle – with heroin addiction, homelessness and Lord knows how many wives is the identikit country singer. On this evidence, the UK can match that, With a metalcore star. Who would have thought it?
Rating 8.5/10
