The great contemporary country-blues artist Charlie Parr manages a trick of sly self-portraiture on Dog. His title song ingeniously articulates a hound’s point of view. The creature objects to human-centric injustice: “You say that I need to be trained/ When I’m only doing what nature demands.” That could also be Parr, seemingly born to play nothing more schooled than the most elemental blues, often a one-chord vamp adorned with a repeated fingerstyle arabesque, three chords at the most. At song’s end, he lets on: “Rain down the water that created us both/ My old man’s soul in this old dog’s coat/ And a soul is a soul is a soul.”
Most every song has such a verse of rough-hewn poetry, like several in the naked lament of a failed, perhaps suicidal, father in “Hobo.” This feels like Parr’s most personal album. He admits struggles with clinical depression, and on the stunning “Sometimes I’m Alright” his faltering voice sounds like a spirit draining out with each exhalation. And his empathic picture painting always rings authentic. “Salt Water” puts you right next to countless hurricane-flooded people now in Texas, Miami and Puerto Rico.
