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| Allmusic |
 Texas songwriter Ray Wylie Hubbard pushed life to the margin and lived to sing about it. In the process, his songs now possess the tenderness of a poet, the empathy of a historian, and the raw nerve of a card shark. On 2009’s A. Enlightenment B. Endarkenment (Hint: There Is No C), he adds "mythmaker" to his songwriting qualities. Hubbard strips his music to the bone here, and uses the Mississippi Delta blues tradition to his own ends. His music is raw yet utterly contemporary and crafted. Snarling acoustic, slide, and electric guitars played bottleneck style, dirty mandolins, pots, pans, stomp boxes, basses, organs, harmoniums, drums, rattles, shakers, and tambourines are the instruments that fuel this impressive collection. On “Down Home Country Blues,” Hubbard is visceral, and you can feel it in your belly bone: “Sugar’s got some sweetness to it as do my baby’s lips/When she hears some ole Howlin’ Wolf, she’s got to move her hips...I’m partial to Hooker, playing 'Crawlin’ King Snake'/I can say that Muddy Waters is as deep as William Blake.” Blues is the backbone of Hubbard’s sound here, but it's not the only one. “Drunken Poet’s Dream” (written with Hayes Carll) sounds like Rimbaud singing Americana in a honky tonk: “I got a woman who’s wild as Rome/She likes bein’ naked and gazed upon/She crosses a bridge and sets it on fire/She lands like a bird on a telephone wire/There’s some money on the table/There’s a gun on the floor/There’s some paperback books by Louis L’Amour....“ Some dangerous spirits adorn these songs: black sparrows hang around the swampy title cut where “...Heaven pours down rain and lightnin’ bolts....” Stomp box, harmonium, mandolins, and acoustic guitar reveal that Hubbard’s comfortable with both choices in the title. “Black Wings” describes life and music-making as a spiritual process that's not necessarily about choice; it's underscored by knife-edge slide guitars, drums, and shakers. In the ballad “Opium,” moaning voices and slide guitars languidly express the “elegant decay” an addict experiences, without judgment. “Loose” is a seductive jangling rock anthem, illustrated by a floating B-3, a slippery bassline, and open, ringing guitars. Hubbard sings about the nature of sensual pleasures in the voice of a woman his protagonist loves unconditionally. The set ends with banjo, fiddle, and his vocal singing “Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.” This is the Book of Revelations in a rattling country-gospel blues in Southern gothic terms; it's a brooding, menacing tune, the mirror image of the earlier resurrection chant "Whoop and Holler." Hubbard is a visionary songwriter. His musical language is so potent it conveys large ideas, secret histories, and hidden truths without excess lyrics or production. This leathery roots record contains music that bridges the gap between frail flesh and powerful spirit ruggedly, sensually, and honestly, making it a work of high art....full text |
| Slantmagazine |
| Having already made a strong case for himself as one of the finest Southern songwriters as long ago as the mid-1970s, Ray Wylie Hubbard, like so many of his contemporaries, might have lost his ability to surprise somewhere along his meandering, hard-living path. But A. Enlightenment B. Endarkenment (Hint: There Is No C), his first album since 2006's terrific Snake Farm, is nonetheless an astonishing work of contemporary observations and cockeyed poetry. It also happens to be one hell of a greasy rock record, steeped equally in Muddy Waters's chord progressions and in whiskey-drenched conventions of country and blues songwriting. At turns gritty, sloppy, and soulful, Enlightenment is perhaps the perfect antidote to the staid Americana scene. Whether he's drawing inspiration from Edgar Allan Poe's "The Raven" for the haunted title track or chanting the title of "Every Day Is the Day of the Dead" like an invocation of evil, Hubbard never flinches from difficult emotional terrain. Invoking Biblical mythology for the stark album closer "The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse" and a hazy, drugged out fugue state on "Opium," he challenges even the most guarded sense of optimism about the current state of the world. But rather than merely dismissing that rose-colored vision as naïve, Hubbard explores the reasons why it is fundamentally necessary to hold on to hope on "Horsemen" and the standout gospel number "Whoop and Hollar." It's the depth of thought and experience that gives Hubbard's songwriting such power and which makes Enlightenment such a thematically dense work. That Hubbard has also mastered the economy of country and blues conventions keeps the focus on his messages, allowing him to pack tremendously loaded statements (such as insisting that Muddy Waters is as deep as William Blake on "Down Home Country Blues") into just a single line. The lived-in wisdom is matched by the first-rate blues performances, with Hubbard turning in a phenomenal bottleneck slide break on "Wasp's Nest" and percussionist Rich Richards banging away on whatever's on hand on the cacophonous "Pots and Pans." The rough-hewn aesthetic is perfectly suited to Hubbard's ragged but forceful voice and gives further heft to his narratives and musings. Powerful and smart above all else, Enlightenment may just be Hubbard's finest record, and it's certainly the new decade's first essential album....full text |
| Austinchronicle |
| Any short list of top Austin artists of the last decade counts Ray Wylie Hubbard in its upper reaches. Eternal & Lowdown (2001), Growl (2003), Delirium Tremolos (2005), Snake Farm (2006), one after another, the Wimberley outlaw's output bumps 'n' grinds a bluesman's disposition and the lyricism of a fascist-killing folkie. Like Lucinda Williams, every blessed bon mot Hubbard drawls sounds lowdown – and eternal. (See also 1997's Dangerous Spirits.) His first long-player since Eternal & Lowdown (another decade best) not produced by Gurf Morlix, A. Enlightenment B. Endarkenment summates itself in a song, Hubbard and Hayes Carll's all-time Texas anthem "Drunken Poet's Dream," originally recorded for the latter's 2008 Lost Highway breakthrough, Trouble in Mind. Tweaked to a finer point here, including Morlix and Jeff Plankenhorn's electric guitars burning a cigarette hole through it, "Poet's" redneck oath – "I'm gonna hollar and I'm gonna scream, I'm gonna get me some mescaline. Then I'm gonna rhyme that with gasoline" – pledges "T" is for Texas and Horton Foote, not for Tennessee Williams. The title track's album-opening chant even whispers mandolin-plucked hints of "The Battle of Evermore," causing heaven's pouring "down rain and lightning bolts." Preachy "Down Home Country Blues" honks barroom, while "Pots and Pans" mattes the platter's overall Heartattack and Vine vibe. Meantime, the lead-off invocation's black sparrow returns as the ultimate bad harbinger (a crow) in "Tornado Ripe," whose harrowing "death and kindlin'" demands the good ol' "Whoop and Hollar" that follows before "Black Wings" beats a campfire dirge. Payday drain and hangover "Loose" could go, but the three closers, beginning with the two-minute sonic scratchboard of "Every Day Is the Day of the Dead," guitar and warnings in Spanish by Billy Cassis, who then helps blow Hubbard's resonator smoke in "Opium" next, hit pay dirt. "The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse" kicks Enlightenment/Endarkenment shut on Dustin Welch's banjo and Trisha Keefer's redemption day fiddle. Four remains a recurring number in Ray Wylie Hubbard's realm. (Ray Wylie Hubbard takes scalps at his CD release, Friday, Jan. 15, at Antone's.)...full text |
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