My Money shuffles along as well, with McMurray specifying what he’ll do when he makes it big and strikes it rich and what Rick Koster describes as a Kurt-Weill-Lives-In-A-Rampart-Street-Flophouse-and-reads-Charles Bukowski approach to tunecraft (Louisiana Music p. 231) continues through Muenchentown, where the Octoberfest oompah backing builds to a feverish cacophonous ending. Runaway psychopath Otis seems to be a recurring character and when Otis Goes Postal the situation is related to something about the moon that ain’t right, and he’s preparing for the Armageddon as the SWAT teams are poised to go into action.
Grandiose schemes are the ongoing order of the day in Toby, where someone’s planning to highjack a freight train and drive it to Rio or some such place, and Carny Boy, fairly predictably, takes a look at life in a travelling circus with fairground laughter lurking in the background. It’s a vaguely unsettling touch. Winding things up, Magnets delivers a nine and a half minute meditation on the influences that operate just under the surface of the protagonist’s life, a languid reflection that turns unsettling as McMurray does a reasonable impersonation of a howling wolf. It’s not his fault, it’s those damn magnets.
Track by track Happy Birthday Sabo! stacks up pretty well against just about anything I’d be inclined to line up beside it. McMurray’s vocals have a fine low rent rasp to ‘em, while the band locks in behind them in a way that serves the song just right. McMurray’s guitar doesn’t head off into virtuoso extravagance, but it does what it needs to do when it needs to be done, a model of restraint on something like Manahawkin that put me in mind of Steve Cropper on Dock of the Bay.
But the greatest strength is the material McMurray are working with. The dude can write, and while things lean musically towards mid-tempo blues and jazz the songs, set in places where buses might run but services are on the infrequent side of occasional and populated by people who might have heard of mainstream society but haven’t got within cooee of the concept are the real strength.
4.5* because I want room for a higher rating when he really hits his straps...