Iconic and iconoclastic Texan singer songwriter and visual artist Terry Allen’s heartbreaking, hilarious new album, his first set of new songs since 2013’s Bottom of the World, features the full Panhandle Mystery Band, including co-producer Charlie Sexton (Dylan, Bowie, Blaze), Shannon McNally, and Jo Harvey Allen; mainstays Bukka Allen, Richard Bowden, and Lloyd Maines; and co-writes with Joe Ely and Dave Alvin.
The connections to Melville’s masterpiece are metaphorical and allusive, as elusive as the White Whale. The masterly spiritual successor to Lubbock (on everything), “Just Like Moby Dick” casts its net wide for wild stories, depicting, among other monstrous things, Houdini in existential crisis, the death of the last stripper in town, bloodthirsty pirates (in a pseudo-sequel to Brecht and Weill’s “Pirate Jenny”), the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan (in the “American Childhood” suite), a vampire-infested circus, mudslides and burning mobile homes, and all manner of tragicomic disasters, abandonments, betrayals, bad memories, failures, and fare-thee-wells.
Appropriately, then, his heartbreaking, new album “Just Like Moby Dick”, is first set of new songs since 2013’s Bottom of the World, takes its title from the archetypal monster of American literature and the American imaginary. (Coincidentally—or not—his label Paradise of Bachelors also takes its name from a Herman Melville story.) “Memory shot her crystals as the clear ice most forms of noiseless twilights,” Melville writes, and for most of the novel, Moby Dick himself remains hidden, haunting Ahab as a crystalline monster of fathomless memory, a terrible fever dream from the depths. The whale remains a specter on Allen’s record too, appearing explicitly only in the briny final line of the last song “Sailin’ On Through,” and on the artist’s Side D vinyl etching and CD insert drawings, where he lurks menacingly beneath the roiling seas of Thomas Chambers, the 19th-century maritime painter whose floridly freaky nautical scenes adorn the album jacket.
Fortunately, Just Like Moby Dick features friends in spades, including the full Panhandle Mystery Band in its current, formidable iteration. It is the most collaborative album in Allen’s catalog and arguably his most sonically rich and varied as well. Terry shares keyboard duties with his son Bukka Allen, who also plays accordion and piano. Pedal steel master and de facto Panhandle bandleader Lloyd Maines contributes slide guitar and dobro, while Richard Bowden brings his characteristically kinetic and lyrical fiddle; both musicians have appeared on every Allen album since Lubbock (on everything).
The brilliant Charlie Sexton, a veteran of Bob Dylan’s bands since 1999—he’s also played with David Bowie and Lucinda Williams and stars as Townes Van Zandt in Ethan Hawke’s 2018 Blaze Foley biopic—co-produced the record with Terry at Austin’s Arlyn Studios, plays guitar, and sings. Drummer Davis McLarty, a Mystery Band mainstay since Human Remains (1996) is joined by more recent rhythm section additions Glenn Fukunaga (bass) and Brian Standefer (cello). Terry’s other son Bale Allen sits in on djembe on “Abandonitis.”
The most clearly transformative new presence here, however, is Shannon McNally, who sings sublimely throughout, taking lead on “All These Blues Go Walkin’ By” and Jo Harvey’s jazzy “Harmony Two” and duetting with Sexton on “All That’s Left Is Fare-Thee-Well,” making this the only Allen album to cede lead vocals to other performers. Just Like Moby Dick is also unusual in featuring five songs co-written, in various permutations, with fellow travelers Joe Ely and Dave Alvin, as well as Sexton,
The Fat Angel Sings 