Reviews

Adam Donen
Album: Bible Stories
Label: Heldenplatz
Tracks: 8
Website: https://www.adamdonen.com/

Originally from Cape Town and now based in Baden-Baden, in musical terms this, the self-confessed devout but confused Christian atheist's fifth album and first in ten years, is dark Old Testament stuff.

With over half of the tracks nudging or exceeding six minutes, it begins with the chiming circling guitar notes of 'What Doesn't End' that, the vocals intimately whispering despair and echoed by dobro and accordion plunges right into negativity and cynicism in the opening lines "It's hard to be sincere when there's nothing to gain", overwhelmed by loss ("I'd say anything if it would bring you back") and the resigned stoicism of "What doesn't end in defeat/Is not worth doing….It would be good if life were brief/So I act as if life is brief /One could be fearless with so little to lose" and an acceptance that "there is always so much more to bear/Until there isn't".

Shifting musical gears into a deep baritone growled, razor-edged rock swagger, the very title of 'I'm Ready For The Next World' tells you where it's going and proceeds further into the desolation of the soul ("I'm not trying to win, just trying to lose more slowly") where "only the devil/Invites me to lunch", hitting a Nick Cave gone gospel stride as, contemplating purgatory, Donen declares "all the repentance in Christendom/Cannot fill what God wills to be empty", the song's full title punchline refrain being "I'm ready for the next world, but the next world ain't ready for me".

Sung like he's dragging himself across a parched desert, with a churchy organ feel to the intro and featuring violin and steel guitar, 'Let My Cry Come Unto Thee' is titled from the opening of Psalm 102, a prayer for the afflicted and an end to suffering ("let my just desserts, and my charitable works and the doom that I carry with me be gone from this moment with all of my talents"), and sucks from both T.S Eliot's 'Ash Wednesday' and Leonard Cohen's marrowbones.

A swaggering stomp with hoarse, rough-throat vocals, the shorter title track with its King David reeks with the blood of slaughtered in the name of power and hubris, from the Bible King David to more modern massacres, following the adage that "there's no issue/A bullet can't resolve" with the striking image "crimson was the pavement /And then came the photographers/To frame up the release/There was blusher round my cheekbones/There were corpses on the street… First there came the genocides/And then would come the party".

'Op 4 No 1' is a brief guitar instrumental interlude before the Dylan, Waits, Cash and Cohen mash up that is the almost lullabying chiming acoustic 'Funtimes In Clowntown' with its knowingly wry refrain "that old time religion, it's good enough for me" set to a backdrop where "there's a lot that's so far worse than pain" and "nobody asks how the damage was done/So long as it's still fun-times in clowntown".

Again musically basking in Cohen's shadows, the penultimate two minutes are taken up with the doomy and mesmerisingly cryptic 'The Shortest Distance Between Two Points' ("If I knew now/What then I knew/I might still manage to see it through/But all the voices/That talk to you/Sound ever more and more like you/With no-one left to disappoint") before it ends with its longest cut, 'Beneath A Grey, Ordinary Sky', Coloured with tremolo guitar , Wurlitzer, double bass and accordion, thoughts of Garland and Monroe hover as it speaks to the gap between the public and private personas rendered in movie-making imagery ("Red heels click/A star will flicker, the camera rolls then slowly glides/As she pretends to drink/Now she imagines where a bird would fly/Points, gives her famous smile, and laughs…Your private pain, it doesn't matter/To anyone, and why should it/Your work, all so expansive, will change nothing, and why would it"), building to the suicide scenario sketched in "we see a bathtub, see a grey apartment block/Then we see a figure, skin luminously white/Cold, red water, scumming at the top/Perhaps it might be cine-Matic, if you were the camera's type/But here's, no rising strings, just silence…".

A heady musical fire and brimstone gospel blues brew of suffering and salvation, this is the sound of the devil compiling a pitiless god's mixtape.

Mike Davies

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