Howdy! It is Sheila’s birthday this week so let’s start with an enthusiastic happy birthday to the love of my life! I’m such a lucky guy to have found my split-apart.
I don’t usually buy her music as a gift. My rule is if I was going to buy it for myself anyway, it isn’t really a gift, and she’s generally happy with the reams of music I bring home on my own. However, this year I knew she wanted a particular band, so I grabbed her two albums by eighties Canadian band, The Box. We’ll be giving those a spin tonight!
Disc 1510 is…. The Future Happens Anyway
Artist: NQ Arbuckle
Year of Release: 2014
What’s up with the Cover? This album is called “The Future Happens Anyway” and based on the cover, that future involves the earth being devoured by a disembodied tiger head of intergalactic proportions.
My personal favourite way for the world to end is to be suddenly engulfed in a black hole created in an experiment gone awry. However, as extinction-level events go, “devoured by an intergalactic tiger head” is definitely a close second in terms of awesome.
How I Came To Know It: This was an impulse buy. I was in local record store Lyle’s Place (now closed) digging through their bargain bin of $2 CDs. There was a whole whack of NQ Arbuckle in there, who I knew from an album where they partnered up with Carolyn Mark (reviewed back at Disc 1209). I’d also bought one of their records earlier in the year at a different record store (Ditch – still open). I liked them both and based on that I grabbed up everything available in the discount pile – three albums for $6. This was one of them.
How It Stacks Up: I have four NQ Arbuckle albums (not including that one with Carolyn Mark I just mentioned). Turns out this is all of them, so thanks to whoever parted with their NQ Arbuckle collection.
Of those four, I put “The Future Happens Anyway” in at…fourth. Nothing wrong with it, I just like the other three more.
Ratings: 3 stars but almost 4
NQ Arbuckle is a roots rock band with a natural talent for storytelling. Some of these stories have an autobiographical feel, while others are more character driven, but they all have a natural ability to draw you into their narratives.
A big reason for this is lead singer Neville Quinlan’s vocals. Quinlan has a tone that is rich and resonant, but also emotionally raw. The combination allows him to deliver songs that are fragile and full of doubt without sounding like he’s whining. A good example is “Panic Pure,” a song about living with anxiety. The song is a cover of a Vic Chesnutt original and hearing it you feel the burden the original songwriter would have carried all those years. Chesnutt died of a drug overdose at the age of 45, and the NQ Arbuckle cover is a fitting tribute.
On the originals front, “Death” covers similar ground, but despite a chorus of:
“Knock me down in your sunshine
The last thing I had on my mind
The bottleneck of dreams is trying to kill me
O death, I'm scared of you tonight”
The song’s tune and approach is triumphant. This is a song of fear, but it is about facing that fear down and pushing through until the sun rises.
There are missteps, however. “I Wish that My Sadness Would Make You Change” is a song about a guy hoping that his sadness will convince his lover to not leave. It is a sappy notion that isn’t worthy of a song, and Quinlan’s tone cannot overcome its cringeworthy theme. We’ve all been there but yeesh, let’s not memorialize it in song, people.
The record has some great tales on it. “Art O’Leary” is the true story of the 1775 murder of Irish soldier Art O’Leary, told from the perspective of his wife. Gorgeous and full of grief, the tune also had me off surfing the internet learning some history, which was also nice.
Also beautiful is “The Civil War Is Over” the story of an angry old man, fighting old battles as he slowly loses touch with the world. Told in the third person, you get to see him through snippets of the town growing around him, as NQ Arbuckle gives you a deeper insight into a town crank that you might ordinarily just pass by.
Musically, the record has a nice mix of guitar and piano, straddling the world between country and rock with an easy grace. The individual playing is solid, but it is the way NQ Arbuckle melts into a single sound that impressed me more. While Quinlan’s vocals and lyrics are the star of the show, NQ Arbuckle is a cohesive band, where the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.
I liked this record more on every listen, and it made me keen to dig even deeper into the band’s discography.
Best tracks: Back to Earth, Red Wine, Art O’Leary, Death, Panic Pure, The Civil War Is Over
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