Pokey LaFarge - Rock Bottom Rhapsody (2020)

Some YouTube algorithm seemed to think I'd enjoy Pokey's Fuck Me Up, so I watched the video clip and I did. In fact, I fucking loved it - a gritty slice of the country that got left behind in the dirt when everyone else signed up for throat mics, autotune and sponsorship deals. I'd never heard of the guy. A month later I came across this album in Barnes & Noble - which is apparently his eighth - and it was the only thing in the store which seemed worth buying so here we are.

I find it all weird and disconcerting. Pokey LaFarge was born in 1983, by which point I'd left school. Rock Bottom Rhapsody, it could be argued, is the music of my father's generation - musicianship, real instruments, black and white photography with colour tint, and yet somehow it manages to avoid feeling entirely like an exercise in nostalgia. It's heavily traditional, I guess, drawing on country, blues, soul, rockabilly, ragtime, honkytonk or whatever you want to call it, and it's anything but a museum piece or an exercise. The playing is expressive without showboating, loose enough to let you know it's alive, and Pokey sings a little like David Sedaris's impersonation of Ella Fitzgerald - with maybe a touch of Ricky Nelson - but his voice is nevertheless perfect and the ease with which it all fits together and slips right into your heart and your veins is astonishing. It's music which still works, which still does its job, and is delivered with so little irony that it may as well be drum and bass when stood next to whatever autotuned vapourtrap monstrosity is ticking boxes on The Voice this week.

This is how all those authenticity twats would give their left one to sound, reminding us of why anyone ever bothered listening to music in the first place. Beyond all the phone connections and satellite links, all the bullshit, this album is what it feels like when you get back down to earth, to the human level, when you think about loved ones and people who died, and the little bit of good you've managed to scrape together for yourself. This album is about the stuff which really matters and about which you may have forgotten, and after the first couple of plays you may begin to wonder how you ever lived without Pokey LaFarge.