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New York Observer
May 14, 2001

Cowboy Junky

Thirteen years ago, Cowboy Junkies released The Trinity Session, a severe whisper of an album that was recorded live, using a single microphone, at Toronto's Church of the Holy Trinity. Rarely has a band so smartly reinterpreted such a range of iconic songs. The standards of Hank Williams, Elvis Presley, the Velvet Underground and Patsy Cline were deliciously reborn through the sultry wonders of Margo Timmins' voice and her brother Michael Timmins' guitar. The pair shared writing credits on a handful of other songs, including the lovelorn "Misguided Angel" and the fatalistic "To Love Is to Bury." (Another brother, Peter Timmins, played drums on the album.)

At first blush, it looked as if the music world had the sib equivalent of Richard and Linda Thompson on its hands: a tempestuous couple whose passion was matched by their communicative power.

But the Junkies never lived up to the brilliant promise of The Trinity Sessions; 1990's The Caution Horses and 1993's Pale Sun, Crescent Moon both had moments of stark beauty, but nothing captured the heavy-lidded wallop of their debut. And over the last several years, the band has slipped so far off the radar screen of hipster respectability that many onetime fans assume the Junkies stopped playing together long ago.

In fact, the Cowboy Junkie's latest release, Open (Latent/Zoe), is the band's fifth album in five years (counting one rarities collection and one greatest-hits disc). Unfortunately, it does little to dispel the notion that the band was a casualty of the 90's. The Junkies' most recent album of new material, 1998's Miles From Our Home, was a sad, slick effort to hit pop pay dirt. Open is an unfortunate continuation of this trend.

Without a major-label contract (Open, like The Trinity Sessions, is being released by the band's own Latent label; Zoe is handling stateside distribution), the Junkies seem to be at a tipping point. The band could either have harked back to its roots of beautiful despair or tried, once again, to reach a wider audience. The Timmins seem to have opted for the latter approach, creating a confusing album of adult-contemporary mishmash.

Where Mr. Timmins' most moving guitar work often consisted of little more than deliberately strummed rhythm lines, here he seems to be trying to don the guitar-god mantle, introducing open-ended jams such as "Dragging Hooks" and "Dark Hole Again" with spacey electric solos that wouldn't feel out of place in the middle of a Grateful Dead concert. On "Bread and Wine," the standard-issue wah-wah guitar is backed by organ washes that might as well have been lifted straight from a classic-rock playbook.

As Ms. Timmins tries to inject some needed emotion into cliches like "Your heart ain't nearly as guilty as mine," it's impossible not to remember how effortlessly she sang of searching out "something small and frail and plastic, baby / 'Cause cheap is how I feel."

Even the album's more deliberate numbers sound as if they were called in. "Thousand Year Prayer," with its tinkling piano lines and second-hand wood block, sounds cheesy and remote instead of dangerously sparse.

I've never been one to begrudge musicians the right to explore new avenues. On Open, however, one doesn't get the sense that the Cowboy Junkies are exploring new creative paths. Instead, the album feels like a sad, uninspired effort, driven by a desire to rediscover a commercial rather than artistic success. The band seems to have forgotten that wasn't the formula that worked for them in the first place.