New Roses by Ben De La Cour
'New Roses' by Ben De La Cour
On five previous albums, singer-songwriter Ben de la Cour refined a subgenre of Americana he has, with a sidelong wink, termed Americanoir. On his sixth, New Roses, he puts up digital billboards to illuminate the subgenre’s dirty streets.
Which is a dramatic, noirish way of writing that he adds synthesizers and computerized loops (the latter via instrumentation listed as “dorkatron” in the credits) and thereby gives a dolefully glitchy modernity to his takes on traditionalist country, rock, and folk.
In the glitches and in vocal tone, de la Cour resembles Beck in the latter’s periodic introspective turns on LPs like Sea Change and Morning Phase. The opening track here, “I Must Be Lonely,” creates bleary desolation with electronic notes that could be a Vegas chapel’s three-a.m. attempt at solemnity. Fuzzed-out beats further amplify the narrator’s hollow neediness.
De la Cour’s remake of Leon Payne’s “Lost Highway” fuzzes out guitars rather than beats, but in the second half of the song the vocals seem to melt and then turn into high-pitched machine code while the dirge tempo threatens to collapse, as if the highway is overseen by David Lynch, not Hank Williams.
Tom Waits could be another overseer on “Stuart Little Killed God (on 2nd Avenue),” a tale told by a drunken vagrant and backed by folk-rock power drawn from early Los Lobos. And the ghost of Charlie Daniels might nod at the name-check on “The Devil Went Down to Silverlake,” especially with Billy Contreras making the fiddle moan.
De la Cour handles most instruments and production himself, and he doesn’t let his new toys take over playtime: “Christina” is a gorgeous ballad of a ragged girl given voice by Emily Scott Robinson, “Jukebox Heart” stomps like a Mark Lanegan blues, and the title track stays pensively tuneful. The digital billboards don’t erase the shadows of Americanoir; they just shift how those shadows fall.
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