These are tough times for any American, especially one with a poet’s soul like Kevn Kinney’s. To explore what we’ve lost and what we still have left, the Dylanophilic singer-songwriter has assembled a cast of Athens, GA characters for his Sun Tangled Angel Revival and a new album of the same name. Part bombastic blues rock and part west-coast country, Kevn Kinney’s Sun Tangled Angel Revival shares the stories of freak-flag waving diehards and unemployed ruralites that the recent presidential campaigns seem to have passed by. There aren’t many happy endings, and the only hope Kinney finds lies in drastic and unlikely change, but S.T.A.R. remains a relatively cheerful take on some pretty gloomy tales.
The grand, anthemic guitar rock of the opening title track welcomes the listener to the Revival with bitter tongue in cheek like a balloon and confetti reception for an innocent man on death row. Reminiscent of Kinney’s former (and still occasional) rock outfit, Drivin’ ‘n’ Cryin’, the same gritty guitar sound fills the angry void on the four-on-the-floor highway shuffle of “Baby I Just Wanna Go Home,” while Virginia native Gibb Droll adds his distinctive guitar chops to “Madman Blues,” a heavy plodding blues stomper that makes up for the hollow jams of “The Great North Myrtle Beach Pancake Master.”
The rest of the album focuses on the other side of Kinney’s southern coin, mixing rock, country and folk much like the Byrds did thirty-five years before. The same eight-mile high jingle jangle shines from “Fly Your Flag High,” a rallying call for yuppies’ inner freaks to reemerge, and “In the Land of Plenty,” whose old-time harmonizers aren’t quite ready to give up what little change they have left in their pockets nor hope in their hearts. The divine cry of Adam Musick’s pedal steel drops angel tears on “This Train Don’t Stop at the Millworks Anymore” as Kinney channels the dejected spirit of a heartbroken southern grandmother both too old and too young to forget the bygone days of plenty, long passed along with the souls of money-hungry factory owners and the jobs they sent south of the border.
If the
Sun Tangled Angel Revival’s vision of a broken America is still unclear, the closing “Epilogue Epitaph in A Minor” leaves no doubt of the bitterness and resentment Kinney harbors for a country and a culture that he feels have sold most of us down the river. His Dylanesque talkin’ blues laugh in the face of the great experiments of the sixties, all of which have faded into dreams of televisions and fireplaces, meanwhile celebrating the small pleasures of coffee wake-up mornings and pork chop dinners that frame our days of working drudgery.
Despite the rancor, though, there is the unspoken message that something better is possible if all the retired freaks and modest geeks and stubborn hicks and capitalist pricks can rediscover the freedom we all once shared. Kinney’s new outfit bravely tries to bring together disparate Americas in song with the hope that its songs can spur others to come together in fact. It’s a courageous statement that has been made many times in many ways in the past few months, and one that will hopefully survive on the wind through the coming years.
