Leeroy Stagger
Album: Truth Be Sold
Label: Clubhouse
Tracks: 11
Website: http://www.leeroystagger.com

You get an inkling that Truth Be Sold, the 9th album by Canadian roots rocker Leeroy Stagger, will be a bit special. For a start, this may be his 9th release but it is his first here in the UK on Clubhouse Records - a label who's roster includes Case Hardin, The Redlands Palomino Company and The Cedars. Their standards are high so it's unlikely that they were going to get just anyone as their first oversees signing.

Then you have the name - Leeroy Stagger - part .32 gun carrying 'Bad Bad' Leroy and part .44 gun user Stagger Lee (who, in the hands of Lloyd Price, is the protagonist of the greatest rock n roll song, ever).

Despite the name, this is not an album full of stories of illicit dice games and bar room brawls, rather one that strikes the right balance between some out and out rockers and some more vulnerable moments.

Riff heavy 'Goodnight Berlin' and 'Cities on Fire' are a pair rocks tracks that are just about as a traditional could want and the sandwich the cutting 'Celebrity' which for all it's "Sha-La-Las" will have you singing "Everybody Hates You Everybody Wants To Be You / Everybody Loves You Nobody Wants To Be You" before you know it. 'Mister' lyrics are 80% defiance and 20% justification of a guy trying to to do the right thing in the best way he can.

'Sold Down The River' is a slow, meandering, lazy shuffle of a song and 'Break My Heart'is the gentlest song on the album; melancholy vocals melding with aching pedal steel it is beautiful, and yes, heartbreakingly beautiful.

Yet all of these tracks are merely a prelude for the albums closer. 'Jackie' is a bit of a beast of a song. It builds slowly, it builds quietly but by it's end it has absorbed all the elements of the preceding ten tracks into just under five minutes of bliss and I've got eight things on my shopping list.

John 'The Jacket' Hawes