A reflective album that finds Boland and the Searchers still firing on all cylinders as they come back down to earth.
Originally from Harare, Oklahoma, but in recent years a resident of Texas, Jason Boland and his band the Stragglers recently celebrated their twenty-fifth anniversary as a band. Those years have produced no less than ten studio and three live albums during which time the line-up had constantly revolved as the band refined their sound whilst building an ever-growing fan base. However, their most recent album “The Light Saw Me”, released in 2021 and produced by Shooter Jennings saw them step away from the red dirt country-rock sound and blue-collared narratives they had come so synonymous with, creating instead a sci-fi concept album with a story-driven narrative about a Texas cowboy abducted by aliens and transported a hundred years forward in time. Throughout this left-field album, Boland’s lyrics explored the themes of philosophy and religion, subject matters not entirely ignored over the previous quarter of a century, but rarely if ever to the fore. So the question is with this new release “The Last Kings Of Babylon”, produced as was their debut album back in 1999 by the legendary Lloyd Maines, have Boland and the Stragglers returned back down to earth?
Well, in truth that question is answered before the conclusion of the opening track ‘Next To Last Hank Williams’, the first of seven self-penned numbers, with its rustic fiddle intro and wry, bitter-sweet narrative of a road-weary musician that in part bears a passing resemblance to Boland’s own personal musical journey, while the second number ‘Truest Colors‘, ups the pace with a strong percussive pulse that supports Boland’s lyrical vitriolic volley towards the music business. There is a distinct reflective, at times almost autobiographical, nature too much of the album’s narrative, though it skilfully avoids becoming either maudlin or nostalgic often by simply keeping the tempo high as on ‘Take Me Back To Austin’, and the mischievous ‘One Law At A Time’, where guitar, fiddle, and keyboards all compete for their moment in the spotlight. ‘High Time’, and ‘Formal’, maintain that ‘foot-to-the-floor’, blue-collared rock approach before the pace subsides with the slow waltz of ‘Irish Goodbye’, with Boland’s vocals reminiscent of the late-great Waylon Jennings as he sings of slipping from a social gathering without being noticed.
The three cover versions that complete the album’s ten tracks are all astutely chosen with ‘Drive’, a song written by Jason Eady, Jamie Lynn Wilson, and Kelley Mickwee proving the perfect conduit for Boland and the Stragglers’ mix of bluegrass and rock’n’roll, while the juggernaut that is ‘Ain’t No Justice’, with its lashings of electric slide guitar sees the Boland return to the writing of multi-instrumentalist Randy Crouch, a source he has mined on numerous occasions throughout the band’s career. The album’s closing number is a beautiful rendition of the much-missed Jimmy Lafave’s ‘Buffalo Return’, a song of hope for those living outside the confines of conventional society.
Throughout the album Boland is excellently supported by longtime Stragglers Grant Tracey on bass, and Nick Gedra whose contribution on fiddle, mandolin, and banjo goes a long way in defining the band’s sound. On this occasion, the trio are augmented by AJ Slaughter on guitars, Jake Lynn, on drums and percussion, while Andrew Blair supplies the Keyboards.
With “The Last Kings Of Babylon”, Boland and the Stragglers have returned to their roots while still managing to expand their horizons, taking the opportunity to glance over their shoulders, before determining their direction of travel, unwilling to settle on past achievements, still driven by their restless spirits. Much credit for the more muscular sound can be credited to Maines’s production that fuses a mix of classic country, bluegrass, and folk, injecting it with a kaleidoscopic dose of punk-rock energy which along with a return to Boland’s joyfully honest blue-collared narratives may well mark “The Last Kings Of Babylon” as their finest album yet.
