Rolling Stone Magazine: No Better Than This Review
By Will Hermes
John Mellencamp’s 25th album, No Better Than This, continues the thread of American archaeology that he began on Trouble No More, a self-produced 200 set of traditional songs and covers. But where Trouble was a first brush with history Mellencamp trying to make it come to him here he meets that history on its home ground. A set of old-school originals recorded in resonant settings (Sun Studio in Memphis; the First African Baptist Church in Savannah; a hotel room in San Antonio where Robert Johnson cut some classic sides), No Better shows Mellencamp channeling spirits and stepping into period styles. They fit him perfectly.
Producer T Bone Burnett rides shotgun, and the duo keep it simple: an old Ampex reel-to-reel tape recorder, a single vintage ribbon mic, a small group of empathetic players. They include ex-Tom Waits guitarist Mark Ribot; Jay Bellerose, whose rhythms shaped Robert Plant and Alison Krauss’ Raising Sand; and stand-up bassist David Roe, who played with Johnny Cash at the end of his life.
Mellencamp’s songs show a writer still on a hot streak after 2008’s Burnett-produced Life, Death, Love and Freedom, arguably the singer- songwriter’s best LP since his Eighties heyday. He shoots for timeless here: Aside from an allusion to an answering machine on the Woody Guthrie-style “Thinking About You,” these songs could have all been written 50 years ago or more. “Save Some Time to Dream” is a gentle folk sermon with a dash of existential doubt. The swinging “Right Behind Me” considers Jesus and the devil “both inside of me/All the time” with Miriam Sturm’s jazzy Hot Club fiddle.
Considering the title, Mellencamp has made a remarkably dark record. “No One Cares About Me” is about a guy out of work, ditched by his wife, mourning a father, a son and his only friend, over an old-timey hillbilly strut. The lead character in “A Graceful Fall,” a stumpy waltz, is also penniless, “sick of life” and pondering the afterlife, “if there is really one.” The dude in “Each Day of Sorrow” insists he would kill himself “if I weren’t so afraid.”
But as usual, Mellencamp is at his best when he turns hardscrabble struggle into damn-the- torpedoes rock & roll. On the title track, a classic Sun Records “boom-chick-boom” romp, Mellencamp runs through a list of fantasies, some quite reasonable, before concluding that “it won’t get no better than this” however relatively fucked-up “this” might be. Welcome to life in 21st-century America, ladies and gentlemen: Let’s party like it’s 1929.
No Better Than This isn’t a perfectly honed set. But Mellencamp has never sounded looser or easier on a record. The most indelible moments are straight-up funny. “Love at First Sight” imagines a relationship from back-seat grope through marriage, kids and subsequent disasters, before deciding it might be better to go home alone. And on “Easter Eve,” a man and his 14-year-old son get hassled in a cafe, slash a motherfucker up, get thrown in jail, then walk off with the dude’s grateful wife. It’s musical storytelling for hard times: far-fetched, violent, sexy, played for laughs. It doesn’t get more timeless, or American, than that.
Painting By Marc Burckhardt
John Mellencamp’s 25th album, No Better Than This, continues the thread of American archaeology that he began on Trouble No More, a self-produced 200 set of traditional songs and covers. But where Trouble was a first brush with history Mellencamp trying to make it come to him here he meets that history on its home ground. A set of old-school originals recorded in resonant settings (Sun Studio in Memphis; the First African Baptist Church in Savannah; a hotel room in San Antonio where Robert Johnson cut some classic sides), No Better shows Mellencamp channeling spirits and stepping into period styles. They fit him perfectly.
Producer T Bone Burnett rides shotgun, and the duo keep it simple: an old Ampex reel-to-reel tape recorder, a single vintage ribbon mic, a small group of empathetic players. They include ex-Tom Waits guitarist Mark Ribot; Jay Bellerose, whose rhythms shaped Robert Plant and Alison Krauss’ Raising Sand; and stand-up bassist David Roe, who played with Johnny Cash at the end of his life.
Mellencamp’s songs show a writer still on a hot streak after 2008’s Burnett-produced Life, Death, Love and Freedom, arguably the singer- songwriter’s best LP since his Eighties heyday. He shoots for timeless here: Aside from an allusion to an answering machine on the Woody Guthrie-style “Thinking About You,” these songs could have all been written 50 years ago or more. “Save Some Time to Dream” is a gentle folk sermon with a dash of existential doubt. The swinging “Right Behind Me” considers Jesus and the devil “both inside of me/All the time” with Miriam Sturm’s jazzy Hot Club fiddle.
Considering the title, Mellencamp has made a remarkably dark record. “No One Cares About Me” is about a guy out of work, ditched by his wife, mourning a father, a son and his only friend, over an old-timey hillbilly strut. The lead character in “A Graceful Fall,” a stumpy waltz, is also penniless, “sick of life” and pondering the afterlife, “if there is really one.” The dude in “Each Day of Sorrow” insists he would kill himself “if I weren’t so afraid.”
But as usual, Mellencamp is at his best when he turns hardscrabble struggle into damn-the- torpedoes rock & roll. On the title track, a classic Sun Records “boom-chick-boom” romp, Mellencamp runs through a list of fantasies, some quite reasonable, before concluding that “it won’t get no better than this” however relatively fucked-up “this” might be. Welcome to life in 21st-century America, ladies and gentlemen: Let’s party like it’s 1929.
No Better Than This isn’t a perfectly honed set. But Mellencamp has never sounded looser or easier on a record. The most indelible moments are straight-up funny. “Love at First Sight” imagines a relationship from back-seat grope through marriage, kids and subsequent disasters, before deciding it might be better to go home alone. And on “Easter Eve,” a man and his 14-year-old son get hassled in a cafe, slash a motherfucker up, get thrown in jail, then walk off with the dude’s grateful wife. It’s musical storytelling for hard times: far-fetched, violent, sexy, played for laughs. It doesn’t get more timeless, or American, than that.