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Mellencamp's Music Shrouded In Darkness

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By CURTIS ROSS The Tampa Tribune

The Tampa Tribune

Published: August 14, 2008

One look at the cover photo of John Mellencamp, eyes downcast, peering perilously close to his navel, and you know this album is serious business. The title confirms this, and the lyric sheet drives it home relentlessly.

It's not just politics that are fueling Mellencamp's dire outlook, although "Jena" and "Without a Shot" are pretty pointed. Mortality, human nature, and his and others' failings are the lyrical materials Mellencamp uses to construct this drab, gray wall of an album.

Acceptance of fate and failure is one thing. Raging against the dying of the light can be a good move, at least artistically. But "Life Death Love and Freedom" is unrelenting in its bleakness.

"I'm not following your frame of mind / complaining all the time," Mellencamp sings in "Mean," and you have to wonder whether he's talking to himself. This album is a relentless cursing of the darkness. The one attempt at hope, "For the Children," feels forced, almost as if a few minutes of optimism were a contractual obligation.

Producer T-Bone Burnett frames Mellencamp's songs with equally grim arrangements, all rural-gothic with mandolins and minor keys abounding.

You need only turn to the news sections of this paper to find plenty of reasons not to believe. The economy, the war and the random acts of cruelty humans foist on each other fill the pages daily. And yet most of us find some reason to carry on and even find some hope amid the horror. On "Life Death Love and Freedom," Mellencamp can't see that reason. Or maybe he isn't looking.

It's distressing that the man who summed up so much of what's sad and beautiful about this country in "Pink Houses," who railed with righteous anger in "Rain on the Scarecrow" and made some of us a little more proud of being from a "Small Town" can sound so defeated, so devoid of even the most guarded optimism.

Stop cursing the darkness, John. Light a candle.

Download this: "Without a Shot"

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