| Popmatters |
 With a title like Everything You Love Will Be Taken Away, it’s pretty evident that Slaid Cleaves’s newest record isn’t the happiest thing you’ll listen to this month. In addition to the typical subject matter of heartbreak, despair, and dying dreams, Cleaves also tackles capital punishment, war, and lost idealism. Depressing, yes, but also beautiful.
The Austin-based, Maine-born singer-songwriter is back with his first album of original music since Wishbones dropped over five years ago. His last release, 2006’s Unsung, was a critically acclaimed collection of covers from, yep, unsung artists and writers. While Cleaves is a masterful interpreter of songs, it’s nice to hear his own material again. He wrote or co-wrote ten of the album’s eleven tracks, the lone cover an eerie version of bluesman Ray Bonneville’s murder song “Run Jolee Run”....full text |
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| Austinchronicle |
| The reason Slaid Cleaves takes a long time between releases – Wishbones, his last effort of self-penned tunes, came out in 2004 – is that he's very particular about what songs he shares with his audience. This concept coats the entirety of Everything You Love Will Be Taken Away .... In a time where most discs have a couple of good tracks and lots of fluff, Cleaves' latest breathes polish and soul for nearly every one of its 42 minutes. The glimmer and shake of set opener "Cry" stands apart as one of this local songsmith's most lasting melodies without sacrificing its lyrical incisiveness. "Green Mountains and Me," co-written with old friend Dave Farnsworth and featuring backing vocals by Trish Murphy, flourishes in the kind of story song Cleaves excels at, and here he climbs the mountain with gritty charm. He captures stoners flawlessly on "Black T Shirt," while "Tumbleweed Stew" lassos 21st century cowboys with a glimmer in its eye. Even with producers Billy Harvey, Charles Arthur, and Gurf Morlix lending their talents, Everything You Love plays seamlessly, like one of Lucinda Williams' classic early albums, pristine, honest, and lingering. (CD release: Friday & Saturday, May 15 & 16, Cactus Cafe.)...full text |
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| Allmusic |
| It is odd that Slaid Cleaves has allowed a bad but wildly popular novelist like Stephen King to write the liner notes for his album Everything You Love Will Be Taken Away, since, as a songwriter, he far more closely resembles a good but much less popular short-story writer like Raymond Carver. Of course, when a famous person offers to write an appreciation of you, it's hard to refuse, at least from a marketing point of view. Unfortunately and inevitably, the notes are written in King's semi-literate style; at least they're enthusiastic. Nevertheless, Cleaves continues to make like a Southwest Raymond Carver on Everything You Love Will Be Taken Away, his first album of largely new material in five years. People on life's fringes -- including a high-school dropout, a cowboy turned drug runner and illegal-alien smuggler, a woman whose husband is away at war, another woman who's abused by her husband and takes her revenge with a gun, and an executioner recalling the days of public hangings -- tell their stories or have them told by the songs' narrators, sung in Cleaves' drawling tenor. Love and money always seem to run out, and violence is never far away. Drinking and drugging occur frequently. Life is hopeless, but people continue to live, at least for a while. Cleaves is particularly incensed about the wars that are luring young Americans away to be killed, maimed, or psychologically devastated, such that the political side of his work begins to recall Steve Earle. But it is the personal impact he is concerned with primarily. The stories are told over attractive folk/country/rock arrangements, which to some extent ameliorate the gloom. But these are not Stephen King-like stories of harmless fantasy-horror. They are tales of dead-end desperation told with the unflinching precision of Raymond Carver. Too bad Carver died 20 years too early to write his appreciation of Slaid Cleaves....full text |
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