Gene Casey delivers. Whether it's a live show or on record, his impressive knowledge of roots music informs his every note. He has a voice that's strong enough to cut through concrete, and deep enough to rattle any ghost of Johnny Cash or Tennessee Ernie Ford. Yet he delivers these songs in a style all his own. Best are the heart breaking Carter-Cash influenced tracks "Which Lie To Tell" "A Better Place" and "Ain't Easy Leavin."
Read more...
Love and Lament
By Baylis Greene (East Hampton Star, July 18, 2008 NY )
H. Lanza
Gene Casey and the Lone Sharks have a new CD.
( 7/15/2008 ) As soon as Gene Casey opens his mouth on his new CD, “What Happened,” his voice plunges to mannish lower registers where only Johnny Cash and Waylon Jennings once ventured. He might strain to get there, but get there he does. It’s as if he had completed a strategically targeted course of bovine growth hormone.
The idea is to match the speaker with the hard-luck tale he’s relating in “Which Lie to Tell,” a dusty kind of cheater’s lament from someone who has told one too many. It also announces a departure for Mr. Casey and his band, the Lone Sharks , who over the years have earned a reputation as the East End ’s best live act.
Mr. Casey, who wrote the album’s 12 tracks, has explored the more rewarding corners of country and western music and its progeny and come up with a disc that remains thematically of a piece — love, sex, and what the hell goes wrong — while he and the boys change speeds with practically each song in turn.
Of course it can be fun when romance tanks. “Which Lie to Tell” is followed by a chugging rocker worthy of Dave Edmunds, “Gone Hollywood,” in which Mr. Casey presents a character who relishes the chance to tell off a woman, a fellow singer, who is not only leaving him, but selling out: “You used to be a country girl, but now you’re going pop. An overnight sensation, you’re the toast of Tinseltown. I’d say congratulations but you never come around.”
The lines are delivered in clarion-clear tones of accusation. A switch to an insinuating sotto voce is made in the final kiss-off: “When you’re on the mountain, girl, look before you leap.” Then back to sharp stridency: “The grass is always greener where they put you six feet deep.”
To the extent that anyone still buys CDs and listens to them straight through in the order in which the artist intended, like a book of short stories, this is one that deserves the treatment. The storytelling gives you a variety of perspectives on the affairs of the heart.
The basso profundo at the end of his rope in “Which Lie to Tell” has his temptations explained three songs later in the honky-tonk “Bad Baby,” and then is rebutted three songs after that by someone who doesn’t worry so much, in “That’s What Cheaters Do”: “If I should see you in town, just walking around, should I keep my head down, and not make a sound? As I walk on by, and catch your eye, not even say hi? And you know why. That’s what we do, me and you.”
He goes on to ask for a rendezvous that night in a place where the lights are low.
For the more sensitive, the shuffling “If I Can Do It (So Can You)” is a loser’s rationalization (“learn to deny, learn to forget”) that sounds like Jim Reeves singing Patsy Cline. “I Was Right,” a lovely ballad that would have suited Roy Orbison, examines the depths of self-pity. The speaker first says, “Pardon me, but I told you so,” he’ll never get over her, and then imagines vindication in the utmost delusion: “When she knocks upon my door and says she wants what we had before, then I’ll know for sure, I was right.”
Sometimes it’s all about the mechanics of satisfaction. In “I Love What I Do,” a roadhouse stomp punctuated by a deep Duane Eddy twang, a swinger’s daddy told him to enjoy his work, but “it took me a little while to find where my talents lay. . . . I know what I am, a hard-working man. Working on you” — slight pause — “I love what I do.”
He goes into the particulars: “I put a lot of care into what I do, a whole lot of attention to the details too. . . . I give it all I’ve got, and I’ve been told that’s quite a lot.”
All in all, “What Happened” is as revelatory as a midcentury gem that comes over late-night radio. Gene Casey has forever knocked back the criticism that a local band can’t produce a great album.
Read more...