Long awaited album projects ominous future

By D.S. Martin and ChristianWeek | August 15, 2008

T Bone Burnett took a 14-year hiatus between projects before releasing his 2006 CD, The True False Identity, and now he's back with another new album. The gap was due to his demand as a producer of movie music (O Brother Where Art Thou, Cold Mountain, Walk The Line, etc.).

Tooth Of Crime rises out of T Bone's collaboration with Sam Shepard in1996 to resurrect the play of the same name. Since that time the songs have taken on a life of their own, so the play isn't needed to justify the album's existence. Even so, the songs on this album are in the voices of characters in the play.

Tooth Of Crime is T Bone's darkest album to date. On the opening track, "Anything I Say Can And Will Be Used Against You," he sounds like a future-esque gangster and movie producer narrating a droll monologue over a spy movie soundtrack. The character seems satanic as he says, "This is a story which is / based on a true story / which is based on a lie."

The difficulty of getting at truth has always been a Burnett obsession. Consider some of his album titles: Truth Decay, Proof Through The Night, The Criminal Under My Own Hat, The True False Identity and now Tooth of Crime. Similarly, on his last CD he said, "Honesty is the most subversive of all disguises."

The bully bravado of "Swizzle Stick" continues to twist and distort like the snake in the garden: "The true source of light / in a mirrored room / doom baby doom baby doom / whatever fools the eye is true / I can jerk the world from / under you."

Musically the album is unsettling and lyrically it is disturbing. Often T Bone's voice barely crosses the line from talk to singing, while the accompaniment is less about melody than it is about atmosphere.

"We've broken the genetic code / and left it bleeding by the road / where murderers loom," he drones in "The Rat Age," later concluding, "Is this not a cruel world / Good morning little school girl." I've never heard T Bone use so many horns, but on Tooth of Crime they are always ominous.

Perhaps because of this project's origins, T Bone doesn't always take the lead. His ex, Sam Phillips, sings on "Dope Island" and "Blind Man." She's as upfront as he is on "The Slowdown." Ironically, she's more dominant here than on any of the music he made when they were married.

T Bone uses a broad range of sounds on the album, although it's almost always either in a tone of derision or lamentation. The beautiful track "Kill Zone," which was written with Roy Orbison when T Bone was working with him on Mystery Girl, is no exception to this lyrically, but does rise melodically as Orbison's songs tend to do.

Recently T Bone has been busy with other projects as well, including reinterpreting The Beatles on Across The Universe, and the exciting new CD by Robert Plant (of Led Zeppelin) and bluegrass star Alison Krauss—Raising Sand. This summer he's been touring with the two of them as part of their band—something he hasn't done since he was a member of Bob Dylan's Rolling Thunder Revue in 1975.

T Bone is not hesitant to identify himself as a Christian, but is always quick to distance himself from the American "religious right."

What is he up to on this CD? In keeping with Sam Shepard's play, he's portraying a future devoid of faith, where the successful man becomes lost in images of himself.

It seems fitting that a believer is the one to so profoundly show us the world atheists claim they want. This certainly isn't cheery music for a Sunday afternoon drive in the country, but it certainly has its place. Welcome to the Apocalypse.