American IV: The Man Comes Around

by

Johnny Cash

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I am the least capable person to review this album. This man had been writing and singing songs for forty years and all I'd heard of him was "Ring Of Fire". I knew the song. I did not know who sang it. It was all but another one of these inevitable songs on every compilation, and one of these songs every channel my parents loved so much would play. I never noticed. Today, I still know hardly more.

One late-summer evening as I was zapping through the music channels here in The Netherlands, my thumb froze over the remote. On the screen singing was, not the usual parade of lewd, crafted, playbacking little mouths seemingly right of production lines, not good capable singers only better than the rest because of management and advertisement skills; it was a man dressed in black, looking old as death, with a voice raw as a crow's. I did not know it was he, if it had mattered. It was Cash, singing "Hurt". I looked, listened but then more. It was so unspeakably sad, so unfathomably melancholic. How can I describe the emotions hearing that song? Haunted and moved don't seem adequate.

Enchantment. I was a youth with a passion for music: metal, symphonic, classic, techno. Give it to me, give it to me every day, all day long. I'll be satisfied. I was a youth, looking at an old man, singing for me, singing of his life and emotions. Music moves me always, but it was this music, barely more than a voice and an acoustic guitar, that drew a tear, dropped into my heart - then another and another. Silent, invisible tears filling hollows, and all that showed on the outside, were a sniff of the nose and a blink of the eyes. I was a youth.

Many of the songs on this final album, including "Hurt", are covers, even though some are his own. Cash here also covers Paul Simon, Hank Williams and John Lennon. Not all of his arrangements are better than the originals. Technically. But Cash performs with such feeling, such sway, such voice, that this is the most cherished music I've bought in a lifetime.

Then, as I sat there oblivious, and wishing I had seen the whole thing, the clip ended and I saw Cash's name. I turned off the set, stood, and hoped I would hear it again. Weeks later, Cash was dead. Today, I still know hardly more.

Five stars to this album

Bram Janssen,

The Netherlands

This is not a great album. As a lifelong, devoted listener to the words and music of Johnny Cash, and very aware of the personal circumstances in his life, I would much prefer to have written something a bit more triumphant. But that would just be dishonest.

So much filler. Well-intentioned stuff that just didn't work for whatever reason - maybe the wrong song for Cash's style, the wrong arrangement, or something more elusive. "Bridge Over Troubled Water", "Personal Jesus", "The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face", "Danny Boy", "Desperado" - none of this resonates and touches the heart the way so much of the material on the previous three "American" albums does.

And what makes it all the more noticeable is the title cut, "The Man Comes Around". In stark contrast, this song is a monster, one of the very best (and immediately a candidate for THE best) songs Johnny Cash has ever recorded. We all think about life and death, but rarely is this abstraction so brilliantly expressed in song. "The Man Comes Around" is frightening and reassuring all at once. The book of Revelations swings open, the words and images jump from the pages and swirl around as if it were a scene from some "Raiders of the Lost Ark" movie, and the spirit is transported. One cannot listen to this piece and not be moved and changed.

And it is so much a Johnny Cash song. The lyric goes "WHEN the man comes around", but by dropping the "When" in titling it, Cash teases us with the double meaning. I can see him laughing to himself when he thought of it. Here is this man, practically loitering at the doorway to the next dimension, delivering with the all power and cockiness of a young king rooster. He's not saying "Don't write me off" - that is defeat in disguise. It's "Be careful treading in my yard, son. Looks are deceiving". Because they are.

Now, that's a tough act to follow. And for a while at least, the album hangs in there. "Hurt" is very good - moody and melodic, soft and strong. "Give My Love to Rose" is strong as well, but it's a reworking of a song done before, and turns out to be a signpost for a loss of momentum. "Bridge Over Troubled Water" is acceptable, but nothing more. One more step up for Sting's "Hung My Head", but then that's it, really. The atmosphere of foreboding and brilliance established early on is lost, and things get kind of pedestrian thereafter.

What this really should have been is an EP. Take the first five tracks, drop "Bridge", maybe add "Sam Hall" as a finisher, and you'd have something tight, strong, and honest. Because, no matter how it was packaged and sold, the essential piece was "The Man Comes Around". There was no need to dress things up any further.

Now, that creaky old SOB is showing us that not only can he do this stuff, he IS this stuff. No time to sit and around and get cozy, John. Put another great one together, because you can, and that's what you do. We'll be waiting for you. Outside the yard, just to be on the safe side.