Rodney Decroo knows what he is doing, he is a consummate professional. The album Mockingbird Bible has a solidity, a care to the details of music making, and a fullness that is fairly rare. The instrumentation, though acoustic, is not spare or anaemic, the song writing is complicated, and filled with the kind of narratives of desire and abstraction that attach themselves to songwriters that might work later on short stores or novels. The whole package has a desire to broadcast gnomic lessons about isolation, but the lessons lack a didactic quality. There is nothing really new, but what is left is so solid and often beautiful that it feels churlish to require innovation in all things.
There are some details that should be noted. The word mockingbird is so rife with other people’s linguistic quirks and on the darkly prophetic title track, he nails it, putting the full emphasis on the full belly of the middle syllables, and the mouth feel of language, with a gnarl and a growl that is somewhere between Dylan and Cave, is filled with such explicit care to the basic structure of language, I like how he sings words like fox, gasoline, snow, radio, and genuine shocking phrases like LA is burning like a junkie on fire.
That last line comes from the gorgeous Gasoline, with a subtext of burn, baby, burn, does something new with the talking blues, a form that is gaining a bit of a renaissance lately, this one is better then most because of Decroo’s ability to create solid pop hooks, something that a lot of folk rockers think is beneath them, and who the best absorb, extend, and abstract. This is one of those instances, where the musical skill, the vocal delivery, and the construction of narratives combine with lyrical play and a solid pop sensibility to make work that extends what is usually done in the fields he is playing.
All of this playing is done in a very Canadian way though. He is horribly earnest in places, serious, and he does not have much fun. I appreciate the skills that are being used to create here, but I keep thinking about Dolly and Willy when reviewing this album, especially how they manage to both sing songs of profound tragedy, and joyous comedy, that their skills are not mired in this notion of work for work’s sake. There is something intensely dutiful that girds Decroo’s work, and this duty makes the album not quite a slog but it lacks the wide variety of human experiences that are found on the best albums by those two. The whole thing could do with a bit of levity.
What we have is a squat, square box of a home, a home that will be snowed on, and will risk fire, and might even be flooded and sort of looks like most of the other buildings in the neighbourhood, that it has a solidity that might not excite but will definitely last. I wonder if he knows that, with the cover art of a black clad Decroo wandering through a house just as I described, with the white iron balcony and the grey utility carpet? The skills required to build that kind of home, to make that kind of home one’s own are rare to find, and they should be appreciated but sometimes it takes a while, a few listens, and putting other expectations on the shelf. I suspect after a year or so, I will put this album in the cd, and think, I should have liked this more, but in the last couple of months that I had it, there was a struggle to love the work, but I did admire the work that was put in it, and liked it immensely.
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