AMERICANA
DAVE ALVIN & JIMMIE DALE GILMORE
Album of the month
Ex-Blaster and Flatlanders founder embark on a riveting metaphorical roadtrip
TexiCali
YEP ROC
8/10
“We’re still here”:Alvin (left)and Gilmore
DAVE ALVIN hasn’t had the best of times since recording 2018’s Downey To Lubbock with Jimmie Dale Gilmore. Beginning in May 2020, the singer-guitarist received three separate cancer diagnoses, before finally, miraculously, being given the all-clear acouple of years later. It was a mark of the pair’s deep kinship that Alvin asked Gilmore to join him for that summer’s run of comeback gigs.
Intentional or not, it’s impossible not to view Alvin’s recent health trials as the subtext behind much of TexiCali, which celebrates ashared lifetime on the road, more specifically the thousand-plus miles between their respective bases in California and Texas. “We’re Still Here” is arollicking hymn to durability that feels doubly apt in the face of an often capricious industry. As guitars burn and organs churn, courtesy of fine backing band The Guilty Ones, Alvin takes obvious delight in skewering adisparaging music exec: “But I’ve been bopping these blues for over forty years/Hell, I don’t know where he is now but we’re still here”. There are tributes, too, to fallen heroes. The stinging roadhouse blues of “Blind Owl” salutes Canned Heat’s Alan Wilson. Arail travelogue rich with visions of cornfields and coyotes dashing across the Mojave, “Southwest Chief” serves as an elegy to its late co-writer Bill Morrissey. And on Brownie McGhee’s doomed “Betty And Dupree”, one of five covers here, both men acknowledge aformative influence.
Some of these songs have history. Gilmore ballad “Trying To Be Free” dates back half acentury, his Willie Nelson-like voice imbued with akind of cracked fragility. Similarly, his magnificent “Borderland”, originally from 1996, rattles along with more convincing surety. Taking the Rio Grande as aconfluence point between Mexico and the American Southwest, it reflects TexiCali’s exuberant sense of musical inclusivity. “So good to be home in the borderland”. sings Gilmore, “between the dawn and the dream”.