Gill Landry -- The Ballad of Lawless Soirez

Don't be fooled by the buzzing amplifier and guitar feedback that ushers in Gill Landry's brilliantly bleak The Ballad of Lawless Soirez. Sparse, pulsing drums pump slow and steady rhythms like hard liquor into your bloodstream, but it's another 11 songs before an electric piano slouches somberly into the strictly Old World mix of gypsy violins, dark and brooding nylon-string guitars and south-of-the-border trumpets. Landry has recently been on tour as guest banjo and steel guitar player with Old Crow Medicine Show, but it's his previous experience as a busker on the streets of New Orleans that brings a gritty authenticity to every song on this phenomenal disc. With a lazy, laconic vocal style, Landry illuminates life in the gutter much like Bukowski, finding beauty, good friends and proof of the Divine in its low lifes, high times, heartbreak and hard luck dames. Landry's dark alley cabaret is sad-sack, Sunday-morning-coming-down-again Spaghetti Western gypsy music. Sadly beautiful ... and not a bad song in the bunch. (Ric Hickey) Grade: A