Dr. John – Locked Down (Nonesuch Records)
It must be difficult for any artist who has established self-conscious personae to step away from the characterizations that they've applied to themselves over the years. A case in point being Dr. John, who launched his solo career in the late '60s as “The Night Tripper” and offered a sinister combination of graveyard funk, avant-jazz, and lo-fi psychedelia that managed to evoke some of the creepier facets of New Orleans' history (that his stage name was originally that of a storied voodoo practitioner is no accident). After about a half decade of that, he shed some of the weirder trappings of his sound, along with the “Night Tripper” persona, and, after an album or two in which even the funk elements began to be scaled back, spent another twenty years or so as a sort of musical goodwill ambassador for his city, focusing on lighter-weight material, toothless approximations of his older work, songs that, while not unpleasant, sound like they would be at home in the background of more tourist-friendly of French Quarter bars.
Somewhere in the late '90s, possibly spurred on by his being championed by bands like Portishead and Spiritualized (on whose 17-minute noise jam “Cop Shoot Cop” he played piano) he began bringing back some of the elements that made his work compelling in the first place, and in doing so placed himself on a separate course, drawing from his previously-established identities without really reattaching himself to either. The subsequent years have seen his approach placed in the middle of a tug-of-war between the two earlier facets of his existence. On one hand, his style could be seen as a slightly less sentimental version of the melting-pot traditionalism that he had come to embrace between the late 70s and mid-90s, the combining of styles to form a safe whole rather than the eerie aesthetic he had championed early on. On the other hand, he resuscitated the “Night Tripper” persona for the Bonnaroo festival (itself named after an early album of his) and began to make music that, though lacking the macabre aesthetic of his earliest albums, was still leaner and funkier than anything he'd created in decades.
His newest effort, Locked Down, leans closer to the latter than anything he's made in a very long time. Black Keys guitarist Dan Auerbach produced the album and contributed performances and arrangements, and the result is an album that's permeated with the sort of vivifying effects the influence of a younger devotee can have on a veteran artist's output. Though the project was apparently indended to revisit Dr. John's earliest material, it hardly seems like a throwback, more a revisiting of all the most memorable practices of his early career, with his various takes on New Orleans funk squirming under, but ultimately supporting, the weight of the stylistic embellishments he piles upon them. Over this backdrop, he piles afrobeat (as on “Revolution” and “Ice Age”), uptempo gospel (“God's Sure Good”), and, in “My Children, My Angels,” the sort of balladry that might come off morose without the spry and ever-shifting backing arrangements. This eclecticism strengthens the album considerably, with the subtle incorporation of varied influences pulling the sound in different directions without causing it to lose cohesion or sacrifice any emphasis on its rhythmic pulse.
But despite the overall party vibe, the lyrical content is some of the most pointedly political that Dr. John has ever attempted. Though social concerns haven't been far from his mind on recent albums – little surprise, considering the city with which he's so associated has nearly thirty percent of its population under the poverty line and a murder rate that's ten times the national average, to say nothing of the ravages of Katrina and its aftermath – he really throws down the gauntlet with Locked Down. On “Revolution,” he calls very directly for, as the title suggests, a radical restructuring of the social order. “Ice Age” (featuring lines like “KKK, CIA / All playin' in the same game”) is a furious broadside against society's oppressive machinations, and the album's title track decries the cycle of poverty and crime in which increasing numbers of people find themselves trapped. But it's not all invective - “God's Sure Good” ends the album on a note that might seem out of step with the rest of the album's vitriol, but if anything, it ties the disparate notes of protest into a cohesive whole, suggesting that while anger is warranted by the dire circumstances of the day, it's futile without some sense of hope.
And ultimately, it's this ability to bind together disparate sonic and conceptual elements that makes Locked Down work as well as it does. Dr. John's ability to work retrospectively, drawing from the more inspired moments of a half-century career without overshooting and pulling from the same tepid Tin Pan Alley pool in which his artistic output stagnated for so many years, allows a timelessness that isn't undercut by the songs' topical nature. Though it can come across like a party that's going on in spite of a world that often seems to be rapidly falling apart, it possesses a leaner, less bullshit-tolerant sound for a time when so many of our existences seem to require a newfound emphasis on the lean and a heightened awareness of the world's bullshit. Making a political album that's not anchored to a particular point in time is a difficult enough proposition, but creating one that isn't smothered by the weight of its ideas, one that's a solid listen, is exponentially more difficult. But that's what Dr. John has achieved with Locked Down – his most socially engaged work thus far, and most his aesthetically fulfilling in almost forty years.