The poorly kept secret about
T-Bone Burnett's career as a songwriter is that he's been the wittiest Christian moralist of his time, or at least the wittiest in popular music. Of course, rather than warning folks about the dangers of sex, drugs, and bad behavior, he has been more concerned with widespread poverty of the human spirit and the shortage of compassion in our culture. Among the seven deadly sins, greed and pride seem to be the ones that worry him most, and he's had many clever and enlightening things to say about them since he first hit his stride with
Truth Decay in 1980. Whatever was wrong with the world when he wrote that LP's opener, "Quicksand," seems like small potatoes next to the political and natural calamities of 2022. Now that
Burnett is in his mid-seventies, he's developed a greater sense of urgency about what keeps him awake at night, and he's not as concerned with wrapping it up in a pretty package. 2022's
The Invisible Light: Spells is the second chapter in his projected trilogy of albums that he's declared will be his last as an artist and the summation of what he has to say as a writer. Much like its precursor, 2019's
The Invisible Light: Acoustic Space,
Spells is built around the percussion of
Burnett's longtime associate
Jay Bellerose and the clouds of sound conjured by keyboardist
Keefus Ciancia, generating slowly roiling sonic backdrops of rhythm and carefully sculpted noise, with
Burnett chanting his verse over it all. The effect is a bit like an organically constructed variation on ambient electronics, or a new variety of dub from American roots musicians, with a thoughtful and gently alarmed Texan at the microphone instead of a Jamaican toaster.
Burnett's recurring themes of the desperate need for a greater love and a cry to move away from the forces that wish to control us in the name of greed and vanity are expressed with his typical level of eloquence. However, as powerful as the music is, his lyrics and his delivery of them have been shorn of much of their artifice; these are messages from a man who wants no one to be confused about what he has to say or doubtful of its importance, and if it's less immediately engaging than his best work of the past, he doesn't seem to worry much about it. Here
Burnett prefers to address us all with broadsides that come directly from the heart.
The Invisible Light: Spells is the sound of a man mounting a soapbox with a desire to make us turn away from our worst impulses, and the heartfelt focus of his message and the imagination of the music that frames it make it far too compelling to ignore. ~ Mark Deming
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