The melancholy “Everything is Beautiful and Sad” and emotionally resonant “Whatever You Want, Whatever You Need” hint at where Jerry Douglas might be were he less tightly aligned with Nashville, but elsewhere Johnson is considerably more experimental. It may be just one man and one guitar, but it’s also one man with a lot of outboard gear in his studio, as well as some unusual approaches to the guitar that will come as no surprise to listeners familiar with previous albums.
How he creates a flute-like melody on the two-chord, 10/4 vamp of “Angry Angel” is a mystery, although the reverse attack that creates orchestral swells on “Briar Patch Harmony” is considerably more obvious. Elsewhere he bows the guitar on the harmonic-driven “Quarter-Tone Soldiers Marching on the Mill,” makes “Boxcar Dreams and Dark Tunnels” otherworldly through copious amounts of reverb, and applies a treatment to “Koto Cries Whiskey” to give his guitar the requisite oriental flavour.
Hardly the roots record that the cover and instrument’s 1930s vintage would suggest. Completely consistent with but still a departure from his earlier records, The Legend of Vernon McAlister finds Johnson as adventurous as ever. With an arsenal of unusual playing and production techniques, he has created an album that is filled with strong melodies but, perhaps more importantly, shows just how far one can take a simple premise if only one has a vivid enough imagination.
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