Noble Creatures

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Noble Creatures Features

• Alejandro Escovedo- Real Animal

About Noble Creatures

Amazon.com Three tracks into Noble Creatures, you hit the album's heart. The opening notes of "Promenade" faintly recall the Band's non-pareil classic, "The Weight," but it's Kevin Russell's high lonesome vocal quaver and Max Johnston's long-toned, austere fiddle lines that make "Promenade" possibly the most beautiful song of this century's first decade. The Gourds, perennially unpredictable, include several gorgeous, slower tunes here, from the plaintive "Steeple Full of Swallows" to the sashaying "Moon Gone Down," and the aching "Last Letters." But these Texans are old-school itinerants, invoking wide-prarie country and Cajun and sloppy bar-room cow punk in equal measures--witness the Tom Waits-tinged "Dr. Spivey" for one growly-blues, off-center example. Jimmy Smith's "A Few Extra Kilos" plays on the boozy, aging-body refrain of "spillage in the morning and again in the night," a mid-tempo paean to the torso expanding beyond its younger self. For the high-stepping, up-kicking Cajun touches, Smith steps back up to the mic for "All in the Pack" and Russell throws in the potentially politically incorrect "Cranky Mulatto," all of which is grand. Make no mistake, however: "Promenade" alone is worth the cost of admission. Treat yourself. --Andrew Bartlett Product Description Kaleidoscopic Country-rockers The Gourds continue defining their own unique musical genre with Noble Creatures. On Noble Creatures songwriters Kevin Russell and Jimmy Smith continue their quirky ramble down the mountain, past dusty delta back porches and through the hanging moss of southwest Louisiana. In classic Gourds fashion the Mussel Shoals rekindling of "How Will You Shine" rides shotgun with the honky-soul of "Moon Gone Down," but on Noble Creatures it's Russell's ballads that mark the album as an epaulet on the shoulder of an already mighty career. "Promenade" soars with a from-the-gut tale of squandered happiness and courses with Danko-like emotion. In "Steeple Full of Swallows" the desolate yet hopeful bandy of banjo and guitar trickles along a delicate dream-song, cut by the acid of Russell's sharp yet tuneful holler. As relevant and irreverent as ever, The Gourds are Noble Creatures indeed.