My Amazon Reviews: Slaid Cleaves "Everything You Love Will Be Taken Away"

Making the World Safe for the Millionaires, 5 out of 5 Stars

I've long posited on Amazon reviews that Slaid Cleaves is America's best working young folksinger and one of our finest interpretive singers. I considered his Unsung to be one of that year's best records. Yet, he has outdone himself on this album, "Everything You Love Will Be Taken Away." This is Slaid's most political and least romantic album to date. The feel bad album title should be a dead giveaway right off, but the subject matter skirts into some bleak territory. "Hard To Believe" looks hard at a midwestern town that is slipping into oblivion as the factories shut down and the first person's romance leaves. And then he tucks in the barb "Here comes another blown up kid from over there, making the whole world safe for the millionaires" as the blue collar remainders head for the local watering hole. It's a part of the hidden bite to all the songs here; Slaid sings in a honey-rough voice that belies the sting of his words.

Many of the folks in Slaid's song still live (as he has put in many of his albums) on the whiskey and smoke, but now they are wondering why they've been forced to swallow a "New coat of lies." The mundane horror of life keeps popping up again and again, like the new widow on "Green Mountains and Me," who learns of her loss as she watches "your Daddy shakes the soldier's hands, frozen in the doorway where he stands." Or the horrific/deadpan delivery of the hanging that takes place on "Twistin'." Like the coal-mine widow he sang of on Broke Down's "Lydia," family loss is just a recurring dream that never seems to lose its sadness...and as he adds in "Dreams," the good dreams just disappoint you as they die.

Yet the music, downbeat as the descriptions sound, is thoroughly likable. The hopeful "Beautiful Thing" swings hard at the liars and manipulators in the belief that "the goodness of man" sees us through "the new dark ages." I got to see Slaid play most of these songs at Philadelphia's Tin Angel and his deft and casual delivery makes the bitterness of some of these songs easy to digest, and his hopeful demeanor carries through "Everything You Love Will Be Taken Away." The playing and production is pure Americana roots music - and it makes "Everything" Slaid Cleves' best to date in a career that already has several terrific albums on the player.