Allen, Terry and the Panhandle Mystery Band - Just like Moby Dick CD

Iconic and iconoclastic Texan songwriter and visual artist Terry Allen’s heartbreaking, hilarious new album, his first set of new songs since 2013’s Bottom of the World, features the full Panhandle Mystery Band, including co-producer Charlie Sexton (Dylan, Bowie, Blaze), Shannon McNally, and Jo Harvey Allen; mainstays Bukka Allen, Richard Bowden, and Lloyd Maines; and co-writes with Joe Ely and Dave Alvin. The connections to Melville’s masterpiece are metaphorical and allusive, as elusive as the White Whale. The masterly spiritual successor to Lubbock (on everything), Just Like Moby Dick casts its net wide for wild stories, depicting, among other monstrous things, Houdini in existential crisis, the death of the last stripper in town, bloodthirsty pirates (in a pseudo-sequel to Brecht and Weill’s “Pirate Jenny”), the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan (in the “American Childhood” suite), a vampire-infested circus, mudslides and burning mobile homes, and all manner of tragicomic disasters, abandonments, betrayals, bad memories, failures, and fare-thee-wells.

A1. “Houdini Didn’t Like the Spiritualists” 4:05
A2. “Abandonitis” 3:59
A3. “Death of the Last Stripper” 3:20
A4. “All That’s Left Is Fare-Thee-Well” 3:07
B1. “Pirate Jenny” 5:20
B2. “American Childhood I: Civil Defense” 2:33
B3. “American Childhood II: Bad Kiss” 3:37
B4. “American Childhood III: Little Puppet Thing” 2:24
C1. “All These Blues Go Walkin’ By” 3:22
C2. “City of the Vampires” 3:57
C3. “Harmony Two” 5:45
C4. “Sailin’ On Through” 4:03
D. M.D.