Terry Allen - Lubbock (on everything) 2LP

I’d caught inklings of this guy Terry Allen floating around the place of the years (mainly since the release of Brendan Greaves’ bio), but it wasn’t until Guy and Ben from Chapter Music used his work as a point of reference in Ryan Davis’ bio during the Oz tour earlier this year that I figured it time to get my head around Allen’s catalogue.

I’ve been in total thrall of this Terry Allen LP since it first arrived a few weeks ago!

Perhaps best known for his 1975 album/art project Juarez (featuring that iconic closeup of Allen grinning with ciggie hanging from his mouth on the cover, also a recent pick of Ethan Hawke and Killer Mike on Amoeba’s What’s In My Bag channel), Lubbock (on everything) is just as artistically ambitious in an attempt to capture the scope of his Texan hometown of the same name, although maybe a little bit more approachable as an album.

Outlaw country in the vein of Guy Clark or Joe Ely, with the humorous of John Prine but with a satirical tilt that’s closer to Randy Newman, this record veers through hilarious takedowns of college football stars, pisstakes of art world pretension, and even self-aware detournements of outlaw country tropes (Cocktails For Three feels like the proto-version of Purple Mountains’ Margaritas at the Mall).

Loveable and listenable yet dense in a manner that after a while you start figuring out the connective tissue between the tracks and the broader concept behind it, although I ain’t even there. Time to read the hefty liner note booklet, the Greaves biography and maybe even the essay on Allen in the 7th Blank Forms volume we’ve got kicking around too! – Mitch