Pine Valley Cosmonauts – The Executioner’s Last Songs
As with their tributes to Bob Wills and Johnny Cash, The Executioner’s Last Songs finds the Pine Valley Cosmonauts banging out some tunes to accompany a rotating stable of indie/alt-country guest vocalists. Rather than paying homage to a single artist this time, Jon Langford and crew take on traditional and newly penned murder ballads and outlaw songs, putting their money where their mouths (and guitars) are by donating proceeds from the sales to the Illinois Death Penalty Moratorium Project and Artists Against the Death Penalty.
It’s contemporary outlaw country, this stuff. The surprise is that it’s really quite good — all of it. Human. Skillful. Heartfelt. These are dark ditties, played straight and turned inside-out, revealing layers of truth heretofore unsuspected or examined.
Usual suspects include activist musicians Jenny Toomey and Steve Earle, who turn in lovely and heartbreaking takes on Cole Porter’s “Miss Otis Regrets” and the Kingston Trio’s “Tom Dooley”, respectively. Other standout performances are turned in by Paul Burch (the Bill Monroe/Peter Rowan tune “Walls Of Time”), Freakwater’s Janet Beveridge Bean (Charley Pride’s “The Snakes Crawl At Night”), Rosie Flores (Hank Williams’ “I’ll Never Get Out Of This World Alive”), and the Handsome Family’s Brett Sparks (the Louvin Brothers’ traditional classic “Knoxville Girl”).
Chicagoan Tony Fitzpatrick, best known as a visual artist, speaks it plain on the righteously powerful “Idiot Whistle”, and Diane Izzo brings it all home with a truly inspired rendition of Ralph Stanley’s “Oh Death”.