LOW DOWN JIMMY
8.5/10
Listening to this I could taste the dust caking in my mouth and feel my tongue swelling. I squinted at the merciless sun, reached for my water. Empty. My horse was on its last legs – the front ones had given out miles back. I plucked a prickle from my arm. Damned cacti were closing in. It was easier just to drift off to the sleep without end… Imagine Johnny Cash collaborating with Ennio Morricone and some mad Mexican brass players, and you have Sydney’s Dusty Ravens.
But unlike most of the bands who borrow a bit of this and duplicate a bit of that the Ravens’ Andy Meehan crafts exceptional songs that are cleverly arranged, superbly played and recorded, and topped by his own compelling voice. Amid the six-piece band multi-instrumentalist Maggie Raven adds all the colours of the desert. The easy path for Meehan and the Ravens would have been to satirize this music, but you can hear that they actually mean every note, with just the slyest of winks lurking somewhere in the background, all but lost in the desert dust. This, the band’s second album, deserves to be a hit. It already is in this household.