Gill Landry - Love Rides a Dark Horse '2017

Tracks list

Tracklist
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01. Denver Girls
02. Bird in a Cage
03. Berlin
04. Broken Hearts and Things Well Never Know
05. The One Who Won the War
06. The Only Game in Town
07. Scripted Love
08. The Woman You Are

“Don’t you know, there is no evermore,” Gill Landry
talk/sings on the hypnotic, atmospheric “Denver Girls,” the opening
to his fourth solo release. Those somber words are indicative of the tone
established through the remaining eight selections.

Since 2015’s self-titled release, Landry left the relative security of
the popular roots band Old Crow Medicine Show and suffered a tough breakup with
a one-time fiancée. That forced a reevaluation of his life and the
introspective, generally dark songs that pour out of him on this album try to
both make sense of the past few years and look forward to a new start.
It’s a “map out of the darkness,” he says in the
disc’s promotional notes.

Song cycles about broken relationships from moody singer-songwriters are almost
a cliché at this point. But when you hear Landry’s looming yet subtle
baritone — somewhere between Leonard Cohen, Kris Kristofferson and Dave
Alvin — unspool stories of broken hearts, there isn’t a
predictable or insincere moment to be found. He’s aware of this as he
states “Just another story/ seems like the only one they know … the
actors you may recognize” after the crying pedal steel that opens the
self-descriptive “Broken Hearts.”

In that way, these tunes are nearly cinematic in their approach, taking time to
unwind at their own pace like a foreign film that gradually gets under your
skin. That’s the model he follows for selections such as “The Real
Deal Died,” a simmering ballad that creeps along on somber organ, pedal
steel and Landry’s expressive vocals that don’t even arrive until
half of the five minute track has elapsed.

In this era of “don’t bore us, get to the chorus,” Landry
digs in to fashion a set of pensive ruminations meant to be absorbed and
appreciated in the atmosphere they were created. Some don’t even have an
obvious chorus. Even the first single/video “Berlin,” which is
slightly jauntier, is a melancholy tale of a man walking through the titular
city “on a twisted cloud of gin” looking for “unknown
pleasures” while reflecting on a ruined love.

On Love Rides a Dark Horse, Landry crafts beautifully, often heartbreaking
scenarios played out over rootsy, Americana folk/country ballads that, even with
the somewhat shadowy subject matter, are conceived from a hopeful heart. Sure,
there is built-in sadness, but these shimmering tracks also reveal a spirit
intent on looking ahead and putting the disappointments of the past behind
without wallowing in the self-pity that often drowns other similarly themed
projects.

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