You can't help thinking that Ben De La Cour has followed the drifting troubadour nightmare trail a little too literally. He's a high-school dropout who became an amateur boxer, spent time playing dive bars and has battled with mental health and substance abuse issues. He quotes psychoanalyst Carl Jung's observation that "everyone carries a shadow" and his stretches longer than most.
You get the distinct impression that he regards making a deal with the devil as a safer bet than placing blind faith in god. “Never trust any man if he don’t have no scars” he sings in Anderson's Small Ritual, a song full of gallows humor but rooted in deadly serious questions about the nature of mortality.
Shadow Lands is De La Cour's fourth album of songs which he has labelled as 'Americanoir' . It's ostensibly an East Nashville record but was recorded in Winnipeg after getting funding from the Canada Council for the Arts.
The title track is a measure of the singer's pessimism as he sings of living in an "empty world getting emptier every day." In much the same tone, the song Valley Of The Moon , where "all roads begin and end" , is a meditation on what Jack London referred to as the ‘white logic’ of alcohol-induced psychosis. Meanwhile, the wailing slide guitar on Harmless Indian Medicine Blues has a strong 'In My Time Of Dying' quality as De La Cour recalls how he "woke up screaming from an opium dream."
Although the underlying message is unremittingly bleak, De La Cour stresses that the live takes of the tracks were done with the aim of having fun, albeit "in an evil way.”
The twanging God's Only Son which opens the record is a tale of a bank-robber who believes he may be the messiah, Basin Lounge is a wild rocker complete with a boogie-woogie piano and he sets his sights on corporate crooks “putting candles on dog shit and calling it cake” on In God We Trust.....All Others Pay Cash .
Yet the dead end streets are ever present and these are the backdrop for the strongest and most heartfelt tunes. The Last Chance Farm is an autobiographical song about his first day in rehab while despite the gentle waltz of Swan Dive , the despondent mood is palpable as he sings of lost love and suicide: “My heart does a swan dive, right out of my chest, into a river of sorrow.”
The unfiltered desolation of From Now On is particularly touching. A lonesome fiddle sounds as he reflects how “it’s hard to hold a candle / in a wind so wild and strong.”
Ben De La Cour is a storyteller at heart and not one greatly interested in glossing over the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. His warts and all view of life is grim but he has an integrity that saves the songs from being despairingly self indulgent.
