Send "Tom Russell " Ringtones to your Cell 
| Allmusic |
 On 19 previous albums, songwriter Tom Russell has told stories about secret histories and compelling, desperate characters along the way. He's written about William Faulkner in Hollywood, the camps at Manzanar, a prisoner in Washington State whose cellmate was Little Willie John, and name-checked -- without artifice -- everyone from to Archie Moore to Charles Bukowski. On 2006's Love and Fear, the songs began to change shape. "The Pugilist at 59," "Beautiful Trouble," "Stealing Electricity," and "Ash Wednesday" transcended his usual tropes; they were darker, more vulnerable and tautly confessional and poetic. Here, on Blood and Candle Smoke, he's perfected this method of songwriting and learned to record in a completely new way, to boot.Co-produced with Craig Schumacher, and cut at Wave Lab Studios in Tucson with members of Calexico and others, it sounds like nothing else in his catalog. Russell played his guitar and sang live with the band, providing little direction and allowing the musicians to open up a natural space around him. Instrumentally, this collaboration employs everything from mariachi and jazz horn sections, reverbed electric guitars, organic acoustics, and miniscule drum kits to hand percussion, marimbas, accordions, talking drums, Vox organs, and Rhodes pianos. The backing and duet vocals by songwriter Gretchen Peters add warmth, depth, dimension, and presence to Russell's songs....full text |
| Pastemagazine |
| The halls of Americana are crowded to capacity with artists like Tom Russell, whose songwriting prowess gained him notoriety long before his performances ever did. Johnny Cash, Guy Clark, Doug Sahm, Dave Alvin and k.d. lang are but a few of the high-profile singer/songwriters whose catalogs include a Russell original (the man has been at it for nearly four decades, after all). On Russell’s latest, Blood and Candle Smoke, he combines forces with Tucson’s Calexico to produce a work of considerable power. His voice is raw and ragged but ultimately right, running the gamut from Tom Waits-like barroom bawling (the diary entry recalling the first time he heard Nina Simone) to songs reminiscent of Cash’s most anguished moments (the haunting and evocative Native American essay “Crosses of San Carlos,”) and even the occasional Gram/Emmylou throwback (“Santa Ana Wind,” inspired by Joan Didion’s essay “Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream,” finds Russell paired with Gretchen Peters to terrific effect). It’s not a game-changer, career-wise—Russell doesn’t need one—but it’s perhaps a work that will gain him the broader recognition he has long deserved....full text |
| Thephoenix |
| This LA-born troubadour with a Dustbowl voice works voodoo on his 24th studio album, conjuring ghosts of the ’60s and ’70s along with apocalyptic visions as he relates tales of gun-toting madmen and dark rifts of the heart. If that sounds bleak, well, many of these songs are, though most of their lost-soul characters — including Russell himself, who appears in the autobiographical “East of Woodstock, West of Viet Nam” and “Nina Simone” — are survivors. Maybe the CD’s message is that there is no such thing as untroubled times or an untroubled mind. When Russell takes his frequently Tex-Mex flavored arrangements into the past, his tales are tangled in poverty and war. When he tells a story in the present, like the busted loser’s eulogy “The Most Dangerous Woman in America” and the environmental-disaster chronicle “American Rivers,” it comes to a bad end....full text |
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