Dallas Morning News - May 30, 2006

CD review: T Bone's big beat

POP CD REVIEW: Percussion, guitar spasms frame Burnett's cryptic jams

By Thor Christensen

It's been 14 years since T Bone Burnett's last solo CD, but it's not like he's been slacking off. Quite the contrary.

Toiling behind the scenes, the Fort Worth-raised musician has become a grand mover and shaker, winning an album of the year Grammy for producing O Brother, Where Art Thou?, earning an Oscar nod for his songwriting in Cold Mountain, and producing CDs for everyone from Gillian Welch to Tony Bennett to the Wallflowers.

Yet none of those jobs compare with the sound of him singing his own strange songs. The True False Identity is one of the creepiest, most cryptic albums you'll hear this year – but also one of the most rewarding.

Mr. Burnett's voice is often plain and mournful, but his songs are Technicolor blues, full of Hendrix-style guitar spasms (mostly by Marc Ribot) and booming acoustic jazz bass. It's film noir for the apocalypse.

The album begins with "Zombieland," a tale of "dark mojo" cast in dub reggae and spiked with mind-bending percussion. For all its great guitar work, the CD hinges on its beats, as Jim Keltner and an army of drummers stir thick, slow Afro-Latin jams.

Mr. Burnett captures the polyrhythms beautifully, making them sound like hailstorms or distant gunfire. In some songs, the beats rattle the bass speakers with crunk rap intensity.

The hip-hop connection isn't accidental. Mr. Burnett might be pushing 60, but he can rap like the devil when he wants to – raging like Zack de La Rocha in "Palestine, Texas" and spitting out beat poetry like a crazed soapbox preacher in "Blinded by the Darkness."

Mr. Burnett's lyrics can be every bit as opaque as those written by his old boss, Bob Dylan. When he describes a character as "speaking hieroglyphics," he's partly describing himself.

But he usually drops the veil long enough to give you a glimpse of his message. Mr. Burnett is a lifelong Christian, and he peppers The True False Identity with dire warnings about religious extremists and politicians who claim God's on their side.

"Do we want to inject the concept of sin into the Constitution?" he asks in "Blinded by the Darkness." "Is this really necessary? Does this make you somewhat wary?"

In other songs, he grapples with the breakup of his marriage to singer Sam Phillips, while "Hollywood Mecca of the Movies" is the story of how showbiz turns otherwise normal people into self-loathing monsters: "Someone stole my identity," he sings, "and I feel sorry for him."

It's unclear if the character is fictional or if Mr. Burnett is really singing about himself. But that's the point. The beauty of The True False Identity is that the music and the lyrics are almost never cut-and-dried.

T Bone Burnett

A-

The True False Identity

(Columbia)