Small Source of Comfort (2011) *** out of five

Yep, my first piece at Slant in almost a month is a less-than-polished music review (even the tagline I chose is grammatically incorrect! Grrrrrr!). Still, I quite like Bruce Cockburn in spite of (or perhaps because of, perversely?) who he tends to appeal to in the states; and if nothing else, he’s fine evidence by comparison that we’re living in a pseudo-theocracy. My psyche was poised for a much harder hit than Small Source of Comfort delivered, though. Hopefully his live show in May will pick up the slack.

And I’m 27 on Sunday. How are you?

…[E]ven when setting fiery internal monologues to his modal-tuned fingerstyle guitar licks, Cockburn evokes a curious concreteness: The fractured industrial imagery of “Tokyo,” “Silver Wheels,” and “How I Spent My Fall Vacation” is so lucid that it feels more like jumbled journalism than its seeming intention as allegory. And the hit “If I Had a Rocket Launcher” is so baldly specific, even in its ersatz third-world rhythms, that it makes one wonder whether the inspiration for the vaguely violent cowboy reggae of “Peggy’s Kitchen Wall” was equally empirical.

“The Iris of the World,” the leading track from Cockburn’s Small Source of Comfort, his first album since 2006, half admits this lyrical tendency. “I have a way with time and space,” he sings, not coincidentally after delivering the most satisfying stanza on the record (the line “In the age of global warming, when all things are getting colder” drips Cockburn’s trademark sarcasm-for-a-cause). The retreat that follows, however, “…but numbers freak me out,” is discouragingly flippant. It’s not the admission of weakness or colloquial awkwardness here that feel unconvincing, but the irrelevancy of the confession. Like James Baldwin, Cockburn’s writing sharpens as he struggles to remain calm and process potentially crippling intensity into something useful. (This mechanism, too, is what enables nonbelievers to enjoy Cockburn’s ecclesiastic musings without guilt; he tempers his knowingly irrational adoration for Christ with the same poetic instinct he uses to discuss his “problems” with the United States’s foreign policy.) If and when he finally arrives at exasperated acceptance, as he ostensibly has with the issue of peak oil explored in “Iris of the World,” the trenchancy tapers off though: “I’m raw anticipation of our rhythmic rendezvous,” he says at the clunky, inexplicably love-struck close.

Read the rest at Slant.