"It's weird, uncompromising and, compared with anything I've heard this millennium, certainly unique. 'A Drunkard's Masterpiece' is a creative car crash of Americana, beatnik rock, poetry, prose, jazz rock, rap, screaming metal guitar, retro pop, spoken word and country noir."
"There's nobody quite like Johnny Dowd, a dapper 60-year-old Texan absurdist who recorded his first album 10 years ago. . . . Here, duetting with Kim Sherwood-Caso, he offers deadpan, lyrical opinion on his two favourite subjects—alcohol and the differences between men and women—like Charles Bukowski backed by a jazz-country funk shuffle. It's really quite brilliant, putting to shame artists half his age."
"Set over three opuses (a nod, says Dowd, to prog rock as much as it is to the great classical composers), 'A Drunkard's Masterpiece' was recorded mostly live on an eight-track in three days, although the invention on display here belies that fact. He treads a familiar lovelorn path lyrically, but his band runs effortlessly through jazz ('Random Thoughts'), funk and, in one of the album's standout tracks, 'Infidelity/Gargon vs. The Unicorn,' everything from psychedelic-sounding country to bludgeoning heavy metal."
"Johnny Dowd is like some self-mutating virus of American music, restlessly bringing fresh twists to old forms, absorbing influences. The likes of Beefheart and The Residents have informed his warped alt.country/rock for years, and stirred in here are elements of The Doors, Miles's serrated Seventies avant-jazz, Los Lobos, doowop and a snatch of Deep Purple's most renowned riff. The album is presented as three opuses of four or five segued songs apiece; the theme is, as usual, the war of the sexes, accompanied in 'Random Thoughts' and 'Unintended Consequences' by ruminations on 'civilization and its discontents,' among them Bukowski, existentialism and Fred Astaire.
All feature Dowd's blend of high tragedy and low comedy, embodied in the cynical charm of lines like 'Poetry is the path to hell, accompanied by the sound of wedding bells.' But then, who else but maybe Frank Zappa would do a song about 'the sacred bond between audience and performer' and call it 'Union of Idiots'?"
Hellwood: Chainsaw of Life
"Coal-black gothic Americana from Johnny Dowd, Jim White, and Willie B that brings Tom Waits exotica and Vic Chestnutt wit to a sedately rocking David Lynch setting."
"A concept album about God, Satan, death, war and an all-American, fucked-up family man, by Johnny Dowd and Jim White with Willie B: this marvelous mess of beat, punk, and country noir makes you worry more than usual about the U.S."
"Unholy trinity featuring Jim White and Johnny Dowd: Uniting the low-growling Dowd—like a dog stirring from slumber—with White's threatening whispers has long been a mutual ambition. Recorded in a New York cabin with third member Willie B, this is devil's music with a compassionate core. Dowd may cry 'lust and depravity'" on 'Thomas Dorsey,' but the likes of 'A Man Loves His Wife'—in which a faded wedding dress in the closet and loaded pistols in the drawer trace a decaying marriage—are almost unbearably poignant."
"Cheer up. No matter how bad it gets, you can be pretty sure life will never plumb the depths depicted in Hellwood. The love child of Jim White and Johnny Dowd, the Burke and Hare of alt Americana, Hellwood begins with 'Thank You, Lord,' possibly the most sarcastic prayer ever uttered, and ends with the end-of-the-rope lullaby 'Dream On.' The fast food thumper 'Chicken Shack' and the battered relationship in 'A Man Loves His Wife' describe unremitting misery, but tenderness and beauty save the day."
"Their voices are chalk and cheese. . . Johnny Dowd's is an earthy rumble, Jim White's is a reedy moan. But this meeting of two great outsiders is a master class in noirish ruminations from the deep south set to soupy, funked-up rock 'n' soul. . . Joining them in their imaginary nightmare outpost of Hellwood, population 3, is multi-instrumentalist Willie B. Between them, they kick up an unholy racket."
"'Cruel Words' may be the greatest album of his career."
The Independent (London)
"From the opening number, 'House of Pain,' with its retro keyboards, screaming noir chords, big drums and spoken-word lyrics about rearranged brains and 'that thing between his legs,' this is classic Dowd territory: perverse, musically delirious and blackly funny."
MOJO
"Johnny and his fine backing band get into the groove from the start. The recording bursts with vitality."
—The Sun (London)
"It's great, wildly creative, uncompromising music."
Paste
"It’s a stripped-down revved-up sound, something you might encounter if the Bates Motel in 'Psycho' had a lounge. . . 'Cruel Words' is the best album he’s made."
Studio City Sun
Links to reviews and show previews:
The Stranger, Seattle
The Independent, London
San Francisco Chronicle
Los Angeles Times
Los Angeles Daily News
Billboard
Tucson Citizen
Tucson
Weekly (scroll down to "That Morbid Charmer")
Omaha Reader
Minneapolis City Pages
Winston
Salem Journal (includes list of Johnny's favorite CDs)
This is Texas Music
Modern Peapod
Studio
City Sun (Adobe Acrobat PDF, see p. 18)
Orlando Weekly
Blog Critics.com
Fort Worth Weekly
Cemetery
Shoes
"Nice title, nicer sleeve—Dowd in a graveyard, debonair in sharp black suit and brogues, poking the dirt with his electric guitar. Whatever's lurking down there appears to have been dug up and set to spooky blues, finger-popping jazz or a cheerful cluttery cacophony of beatniky sounds that wouldn't be out of place on a Tom Waits record. Upbeat opener Brother Jim, the disturbing Dear John Letter and Dylan's Coat and Rest in Peace, with their spoken word vocals, sound like a Waitsian wake being held on unhallowed ground. . . . Wonderfully warped yet remarkably accessible."
MOJO
"There's intense and there's Johnny Dowd. He's Nick Cave with a hangover. Hank's lonesome whistle spat through Waits's grinder, with Beefheart on the side, coming on like a flu-ridden Texan undertaker singing broken folk laments for a dead dog he never cared much for anyway. In the main, this—Dowd's sixth album since he started recording as many years ago at 50—ratchets along with trademark edge, his cracked larynx, jagged guitar and spooky organ possessed of something quite unnerving, eking out gothic tales laced with tar-black humour."
Time Out London
"The ramshackle cacophony of the opening Brother Jim sets the tone, with Dowd sounding like some deranged revivalist preacher accompanied by The Magic Band and The Shaggs as he notes gloomily how 'Life gets meaner and meaner as the years stumble by.' From there on, the shadow of he grave is never far away until the final berserk polka instrumental Rip Off affords a little wordless solace. Not that Dowd's worldview is entirely bereft of humour, albeit the mordant gallows humour of Christmas is Just Another Day, where he effects a brilliant commingling of the pathetic and the bathetic, tempering his initial moan that 'I'm too sad to be gay / Christmas is just another day / Someone else's holiday' with the patently insincere admonition, 'Don't forget your mom at Christmas / It's a mother's special day.' "
The Independent (London)
MOJO
"There's few crumbs of comfort to chew on in these songs, which confront the suicidal horror of the proletarian American experience with a fearlessness that wipes away any illusions about the fabled American Dream.
Take the opening, title-track, which creeps in on the back of a desultory drumbeat and noise collage intermittently lacerated with shards of tortured electric guitar as Dowd drawls his tale of a wretched adulterous liaison: 'They checked into a motel in a little town called Paradise/ It had air-conditioning and television and a Magic Finger king-sized bed/ They lay down in a frenzy like rats engulfed in flames/ Flowers, old wire flowers, will not obliterate their shame.' The juxtaposition of the mockingly ironic detail - the town called Paradise, the Magic Finger bed, the old wire flowers - with the revulsion of 'rats engulfed by flames' gives the song a visceral power that makes you want to wash your hands in absolution after you've heard it."
The Independent (London)
"With its intoxicating psychobilly, violent musical convulsions and cacaphonous garage-punk, The Pawnbroker's Wife is plenty dark, but there are also some of Dowd's most accessible songs. From the retro pop of 'I Love You' and country duet 'Separate Beds' through Lee Hazelwood cover 'Sleeping in the Grass' and ballad 'True Love.' The latter is a murder ballad, but it's the man who's killed. "
MOJO
"Bolstered by instruments that sound as if they had been abandoned by a travelling circus, each of the 14 cuts is imprinted with an indelibly individual character. A persistent strain of blue-collar Expressionism also runs through the album. . . . Not only is he a master at exposing the unsettling underside of everyday life, he also makes the commonplace seem anything but."
Time Out NY
"Featuring mover Dowd and hair-salon proprietor Kim Sherwood-Caso of Ithaca, N.Y., this is the bad conscience of country music as surely as the sheriff in Jim Thompson's 'The Killer Inside Me' is John Wayne's — though the people in Dowd's songs are more like Thompson's most humiliated characters, and in their most profound moments of embarrassment. With Sherwood-Caso's voice going far past the song in 'Hell or High Water' and Dowd's guitar scraping the paint off its darkest corners, or in the bad hotel room called up by the unclean '50s white jazz in 'Cradle to the Grave,' it's the sound of 'the joke's on me' — the somehow pristine sound of even that kind of joke failing to get a laugh out of the crowd."
“ Real Life Rock Top Ten”
Addicted to Noise
"In songs like 'Cradle to the Grave,' 'Death Comes Knocking' and 'Lost Avenue,' Mr. Dowd wanders a landscape battered by betrayal, threat and barely submerged violence. . . . Mr. Dowd's characters also embody a ravaged rural stoicism, a tough determination to survive, which contemporary country music has turned it's back on with an embarrassed shudder. That's too bad because country's roots are buried deep in that soil."
“Country Singers Who Still Display A Country Heart”
The New York Times
"It is tempting to become thoroughly absorbed in the awfulness of the stories these songs tell. But it's the music, not the words, that makes this work. Enormous art and craft go into each song, and space is allowed to hang empty before being filled with spartan grace. Frank Zappa would be proud."
Wall of Sound
"If Willie Nelson turned into Mr. Hyde, he'd be Johnny Dowd. Backwoods Gothic tales of love, death, and a perverse God arrive with a twang and a junkyard clatter, reaching for laughs that grow uneasy."
“ Favorite CDs You Nearly Missed”
New York Times
"Dowd's sophomore effort commences with the Hank Williams title cut, rendered as a kind of bizarrre polka-cum-Delta bloose. From there, Dowd - singing in an astonishing range of character-rich voices that veer from a kind of Howe Gelb hick-drawl to a nodding-out Nick Cave mutter to a Beefheart growl to (I'm not kidding) a Bono whisper - surrounds himself in an equally daunting array of arrangements that fully complement his tales of self-inflicted misery and diseased love."
No Depression
"Though Dowd came across more like an Appalachian anachronism with the bare-bones murder balladry of 1997's 'Wrong Side of Memphis' debut, here he seems like a visionary, putting an X-ray to the underbelly of Americana, finding a strain of creepiness that extends from the carnival to the cocktail lounge to the country honky-tonk. . . . My two favorite albums thus far in '99 are Moby's techno spiritual 'Play' and this. Moby is heaven; Dowd is hell."
Austin American Statesman
"A moving man from Ithaca, New York, embarks on the scariest ride of the year in this homemade work of genius."
Billboard
"The jaw-dropping intensity of his dark, twisted country blues makes Johnny Dowd an outright godsend. This exquisite debut is proof that not every story has been told."
Request
"A hillbilly's version of Rubber Soul - only it's not about love's transcendence, but about sin, death, blood, and Jesus. You can listen to it as the soundtrack to 'Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer' - just rent the video, turn off the sound of the movie and settle in for a nightmare ride."
Addicted to Noise Critics’ Picks
Live Performances
Chicago Tribune
“Watching Johnny Dowd in action, it is tempting to believe that these are pop’s last days, and Dowd has been sent as a haringer of the apocalypse. Perhaps he has come to punish us for the sins of Eminem.”
The Guardian (London)
“His American Gothic beatnik blues was even more powerful live than on the record. The word ‘unique’ is often overused, but Mr. Dowd is a true original. I doubt I’ll see anything like it ever again.”
KCMU, Seattle