Midnight At The Movies by Justin Townes Earle
Album Description
Within the first song on Justin Townes Earle’s second album Midnight At the Movies,
you just know you’re hearing something special, that you are party to
the unknown and exhilarating paths being explored by an artist on the
creative ascendancy. Midnight At The Movies displays an
adeptness and musical sophistication of remarkable, organic breadth and
is as lyrically sharp as a lover’s tongue as she is walking out the
door.
If you didn’t look at the songwriting credits, you’d swear
the songs were penned on the stoop of a one-pump filling station in
dust bowl era Oklahoma, the smoke-filled song and dream factories of
Tin Pan Alley, or at the back door of Tootsie’s Orchid Lounge in
Nashville. Justin effortlessly taps the romanticism imbued in the
beaten-soled travelogues and mythos of Woody Guthrie; the lounging
around a campfire at a work camp and the edgy angst of a wintry
Minneapolis (yeah, just try to get that mandolin line from the cover of
the ‘Mats’ “Can’t Hardly Wait” out of your head.)
Midnight at the Movies
is held firm by Justin’s astonishing vision and conviction, yet roams
o’er the vast landscape of American music without so much as a stumble.
From the deft ear for orchestration and ambient arrangement reminiscent
of Randy Newman right through, somehow, the countrypolitan cool of
Lambchop and hipster retro vibes of Palace Brothers or Magnetic Fields
(simply look to the title track for proof), to the amber smooth swing
of the Ray Price smilin’ thru the heartache school of country (“What I
Mean To You,” “Poor Fool”), to the immediacy and disarming simplicity
of country blues (“They Killed John Henry”), to songs that tell a
novel’s worth of emotion in a few lines (“Mama’s Eyes”), Justin Townes
Earle pulls it all off with a confidence and candor that tells the
listener that the daring exhibited on his debut album The Good Life only hinted at the growth to come.
(From Bloodshot Records)
