AMERICANA Album of the month
JERRY DAVID DECICCA
Cardiac Country SOPHOMORE LOUNGE8/10
Texas resident opens his heart on sixth solo outing
Jerry David DeCicca: soulful and understated
EVESEARLS
SINCE quitting The Black Swans in 2012, founder member DeCicca has enjoyed something of an eclectic career. His solo albums have been interspersed with production duties for outsider artists like Ed Askew, Chris Gantry and Will Beeley, plus collaborative projects with Sir Douglas Quintet veteran Augie Meyers and overseeing archival projects for the Numero Group.
The past couple of years, however, have seen DeCicca undergo some intense personal drama. Mostly conceived in a two-week burst at home in Bulverde, Texas, Cardiac Country was written just prior to a previously undetected health issue that required open heart surgery. Peculiarly enough, many of these songs feel like premonitions of fate, as DeCicca wrestles with precious notions of time, mortality and loss. “Long Distance Runner”, for example, braces itself for some impending challenge: “There’s others around you/ But you’re in this alone… Your heart remains healthy for what lies ahead”. “Good Ghosts” finds him drunk on the couch, revelling in music by heroes who’ve passed on, among them Fred Neil: “I can hear voices/Coming out of wooden boxes”. On the rueful “Mourning Locket”, a curl of hair sits within a necklace worn by his lover as a keepsake.
In less skilled hands, all this might come off as maudlin or overly sentimental. But DeCicca invests these electric country songs with a warmth and wit that makes them all the more affecting, rendered by the kind of soulfully understated vocal that brings to mind Jake Xerxes Fussell or the aforementioned Meyers. There’s a sympathetic band of helpers too, not least British legend BJ Cole, whose pedal steel lines bring subtle movement and colour. Similarly, organist Trevor Nealon’s contributions feel akin to bathing everything in a natural Texan spring. Crucially too, DeCicca’s wife Eve Searls supplies the gentlest of vocal harmonies throughout.