‘Flesh & Bone’ is BARNEY BENTALL'S latest release, and his fifth solo album. Barney has had a long and distinguished career in music, starting with Barney Bentall & The Legendary Hearts, which formed in 1980, having no small measure of success in Canada, and who still meet up to play the occasional gig, despite solo projects and other interests.
Where this album succeeds is through Barney’s storytelling, on an album that veers from country to folk, with occasional Celtic influences thrown in. The lyrics repeatedly draw in the listener into a world of folklore history. The opening track ‘The Outskirts of Buffalo’, is a lovely country-flavoured pop tune that gets the album off to an easy start: - “There’s part of you that gets me. There’s part of you that don't/ There’s part of me that understands you, and part of me that won’t...Heart and soul, on the outskirts of Buffalo, land of the strip mall and blowing snow.”
However it is on tracks like ‘The Ballad of Johnny Hooke’ that Barney’s song writing really comes to the fore. This is another country-tinged song, but the storytelling and phrasing is just perfect. It relate the story of a man who builds a homestead, marries and raises a family, one by one, the children leave the ranch, and ultimately sell it while Johnny dies in a nursing home: - “Johnny Hooke went riding in a cold and snowy land/ Looked up to the mountains ‘tis here I’ll make my stand/Cut some logs and built a cabin, tried to keep his horse alive/ But when the creeks had started flowing again/ only Johnny had survived.”
|
What makes this an excellent track is the way we are taken through Johnny’s life story, which ultimately ends in sadness as Johnny passes on pining for his wife.
Barney states that the whole album rotates around change and things moving on, to quote the man himself: “vibrant flesh falls away and an older world is left with the bones. Life keeps rolling over. It’s the way she goes.” Well, on the strength of an album like this, Barney has created a modern classic which will resonate with far more than his staple Canadian audience.
|
