[rating=7.00]
Billy Bragg calls this latest set the follow-up to Mermaid Avenue he never made, and he’s right: a single listen confirms Tooth & Nail tops anything he’s recorded since those 1997 sessions with Wilco, which drew from Woody Guthrie’s poetry archive and yielded 47 songs and a trio of exceptional albums. The difference this time lies in the words, which belong to Bragg and not Woody, though his spirit turns up in a cover of “I Ain’t Got No Home” from Tooth & Nail, interpreted in the way only Bragg has mastered.
Songs like “No One Knows Nothing Anymore” and “Your Name On My Tongue” recall that melancholy mood and introspective spirit; Tooth & Nail might well have been called Light Songs as a sort of nemesis to Fight Songs, Bragg’s 2011 collection of a decade’s worth of downloads, which made for a disjointed set. Sneers and snarls underscored much of that album, and where fury and fuzz drove songs like “The Big Lie” and “Last Flight Out to Abu Dhabi,” Tooth & Nail strips away that grit and politic in favor of love tunes like “Chasing Rainbows,” where Bragg pleads, “Please don’t let my complacent mind bely my loving heart.”
There’s not an electric moment on the album, not in the Bragg sense anyway, and this makes for a welcome break in his catalog. The gentle pedal-steel guitar and drums from half of Ray LaMontagne’s Pariah Dogs lineup, Greg Leisz and Jay Bellerose, especially suit numbers like the folksy Golden Rule sendup, “Do Unto Others.” They play with little more than a whisper on these songs, many of which would sound right at home on a greasy-spoon jukebox, around a campfire, or in a moment of meditation.
Joe Henry, who has produced Bonnie Raitt and Allen Toussaint, assembled the four-piece lineup, recorded them live with Bragg, kicked the overdubs, and kept the process to five days. Tooth & Nail is the second album in 30 years Bragg has cut this way. He shouldn’t wait 30 years to do it again.
