CD Reviews

Calling Reckless Kelly a country band has always been somewhat of a misnomer; even they describe themselves as “a rock band with a fiddle.” On Somewhere in Time, their 12-song tribute to a major influence, Pinto Bennett and the Famous Motel Cowboys, Reckless Kelly is a rock band with a fiddle and pedal steel — and chimey guitars and Bennett’s very country-leaning lyrics.

Not since Dante has a man walked through hell and lived to tell the tale with such poetic beauty as Jon Dee Graham. The gory details, which have seeded everything from benefit concerts to a tribute album to innumerable painful ly funny horror stories from the man himself, needn’t be rehashed here; all that matters is that the battered and semi-broken former Skunk and True Believer is still standing — and mining the wreckage for the best songs of his life.

I don’t know what takes more guts for a singer-songwriter:  covering Journey’s all-time wimpiest power ballad without a trace of hipster irony, or giving equally honest props to Wal-Mart.

Roadhouse legend Delbert McClinton comes up with a grand slam at the spry age of nearly 70, and nearly 35 years after such definitive discs as Victim of Life’s Circumstances and Genuine Cowhide. Yeah, his voice may show a little wear and tear from his long journey.