Image via You've Changed Records
Cobra Poems By Daniel Romano’s Outfit
Writing about novelist Iris Murdoch, fellow novelist Martin Amis suggested that her prolific output deflected a lot of criticism. When she was putting out a book every year or two, did they all have to be masterpieces, or did they just have to be good?
The same could be written of Daniel Romano. Cobra Poems is the Ontario singer-songwriter’s second album of the year with his band the Outfit. (He released four with them last year.) While the other 2021 album, Fully Plugged In, is from a 2020 live set, he also lengthened his solo discography with Kissing the Foe. They can’t all be classics, y’know?
Cobra Poems is more classic rock than classic, and it continues Romano’s knowledgeable fascination with genre cross-pollination: in this case, that period in the early 1970s when the Stones were just the biggest boys to go country (& western).
Romano doesn’t make Jagger’s pushy effort to seem downhome, and probably couldn’t anyway; his reedy voice has already been provably well-suited to New Wave and power-pop. The other side of that voice, however, is a lilting croak that, especially in an elaborately wistful track like “Still Dreaming,” lends him Jeff Tweedy’s affable folk authenticity.
With horns evoking both the Stones and early Springsteen in “Tragic Head” and “The Motions,” Romano’s Outfit also swings into late-period Beatlesque codas for “Nocturne Child” and “Holy Trumpeteer” [sic], and “Baby If We Stick It Out” turns a funky beat almost worthy of Curtis Mayfield’s “Pusherman” into foursquare Flamin’ Grooves rock ‘n’ roll.
Julianna Riolino stirs in the kind of dark femininity Stevie Nicks once represented to Fleetwood Mac, and her lead-vocal turns, especially on “Tears Through a Sunrise,” add weight to the collective sense of the Outfit. She and they don’t quite make Cobra Poems a stunner, but they ensure that Daniel Romano is prolific, not profligate.
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