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Luke Elliot - Death of a Widow (2010)
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1. Get 'Em While They're Hot
2. When That Great Ship Went Down
3. Thing to Thing
4. The World Ain't A Friend of Mine
5. Death of a Widow

1. Ballad of a Priest
2. Blue and Green
3. Let It Rain on Me
4. Jesse James
5. Who Are You
6. Virginia
7. To Feel Your Love
8. These Dreams of You

 **Out of print**

It's a damn shame that the grinding squeal of metal-on-metal of a train coming into the station, thick steam billowing out through the waiting crowd of gunslingers, priests and thieves is imagery so co-opted by generic Americana bands and Morricone-wanna-be's, because that is the stuff of poets. Guy Clark's 'Desperados Waitin' On a Train' and Leonard Cohen's 'Ballad of the Absent Mare.'  I'm talking about Nick Cave's 'The Proposition,' (not any of that Young Guns shit) the stuff with the kind of grit that stays under your nails when you die.

And that brings us to Luke Elliot.  This New Jersey native's first full-length record, 'In Our Embrace,' has all of that grit in every crack and crevasse of its runtime.  And not in any sort of pedal-steel parody way, but in the way of withered waltzes, barreling ragtime, and hypnotic piano dirges underpinned by literate narrative that coats each melody like chipped paint on a broken down jalopy.  There are some easy comparisons to the aforementioned Cohen, and occasional shades of Dylan (Ballad of a Thin Man, perhaps?), and maybe some of those real piano-y Tom Waits' albums that still haven't gotten their due ('Foreign Affairs' or 'One From the Heart').  But that doesn't really get to the heart of it.  Those guys color the prose of everyone who's written a song in the last 40 years.

He has to be channeling something much older and creakier than those guys, and still delivering it a way that connects him with a very short list of modern writers.  Jagjaguwar's Simon Joyner, perhaps, or Josh Pearson since he's left the cacophony of 'Lift to Experience' behind him.  Basically, Luke Elliot is creating a sound without a whole lot of direct lineage, yet it still sounds lived in and familiar, the words streaming by as you try to catch up and parse the meaning like you almost knew the song from a dream.  You know, the one where you're being hunted by wolves while your lover calls to you from an impossible distance?

For all the delicate intimacy of the record, Elliot's live show is another beast altogether - backed by Ryan Stokes (drums and accordion), Richard Russano (electric guitar) and Ben Fleisher (bass), they re-engineer the songs into Jerry Lee Lewis piano-wrecking rave-ups, the band effortlessly funneling the brimming intensity under the surface of the record into a full-on euphoric rock show.  They're playing all over the Northeast these days, so make sure to catch them when they roll into town.  You'll know them by the fog of swirling steam and the shuddered shriek of old metal coming to a stop.