Sylvia Rose Novak - Someone Else's War (2018)

Four years on from her Chasing Ghosts debut, the Alabama-born multi-instrumentalist singer-songwriter Sylvia Rose Novak returns with a self-produced album that welds the personal and the political. Blake Bolton’s tumbling and circling drum pattern provides the foundation for album opener Wildflowers, guitars and cello in the background, essentially a song about not waiting until it’s too late as she sings about standing together on the precipice deciding whether to “shout in to the darkness” or keep it in your bones.

Vocally likened to Amada Shires, but with a slightly earthier edge to her Southern twang., while the guitar work on the Cormac McCarthy-inspired ecological themed The Road (“the sun is like a child /Who has turned away in shame/Even though we only have ourselves to blame”) calls Neil Young to mind leavened with her powerful fiddle work, but the comparison that comes most often to mind is Warren Zevon, both in her smart lyrics and melodic structures.

Appropriate then that the sole cover should be one of his, a sassy take on I Was In The House When The House Burned Down, and it’s testament to her writing skills that the original material can stand shoulder to shoulder with his, her lyrics often oblique and built around images rather than direct. Listen, for example, to the politically subtle commentary of the strummed, walking beat title track with its bleak visions of “cities left to ghosts” and “stars held up by wires” and a reminder to the powermongers that “a king is just a pawn/After the crown is gone/ And the bishops have all disappeared.”

The other songs here are more about bruised and broken relationships. A poignantly plaintive fingerpicked number about a dead marriage, Bombs & Blossoms conceals an emotional fist of iron behind its gentle delivery as the narrator, “a singer for someone without a voice”, confesses “I pace to pray and watch the clock/He’s seldom here, we never talk/Outside a passing murmur /Or a phone call.”

The character here could be the same woman in the melodically circling Devil’s In The Details, ringing guitars bookended with drum thump and fiddle, who, staring at the crack in the ceiling, “between the bedsheets all alone”, all promises stolen away by time, decides she’s “a better runner than a wife.”

That sense of regretful reflection also informs the slightly more uptempo chiming guitars of the no less aching Number 9, looking back to when “I was still young and the world was still mine/For the taking”, a train song about want to be carried far from the pain and featuring a plangently fine electric guitar solo from Kelen Kylee.

Turning to Appalachian banjo-fed colours and echoes of Baez channeling The Band, God, The Devil, & Me is a compressed tragedy sung in the voice of the wife of a moonshiner, mother of seven kids, scraping a hard-scrabble living with the law closing in, her man, sung by Kylee, refusing to run because “It’s hard to fear the flames a’coming/When you spend every day in hell.”

The same Southern Gothic blood that runs through the work of Faulkner, Carson McCullers and McCarthy also courses through Novak’s veins while the images of economic depression, vanished dreams, beer glass machismo, domestic war and small towns strangled of life by the interstate that percolate through Two-Lane Town carry with them Steinbeck resonances.

It would seem to end on a similarly desolate note in Santa Ana, where “the storefronts all sit empty/ And the streets once made of gold/Are painted black with ashes/Of a story never told.” But, to borrow the imagery of the opening track, there may still be wildflowers among the rubble, with memories of a girl “Dressed to beat the band…dancing through the embers/With a drink high in her hand.” Whether you see this as Dante’s inferno or a path out of despair rather depends if you’re someone who’d choose the hell you know or the unknown beyond the exit. Take her hand and let her lead you “Gently through the fires/That line the fields and separate/The prophets from the liars.” This may be someone else’s war, but you’ll recognise the battles.