So one day, Shooter Jennings comes in. His awesome name was given to him by his parents, country icon Waylon Jennings and Jessi Colter. In every official promo picture, he’s smoking and/or drinking whiskey, with a fucking handgun under his belt. His album was called Put The “O” Back In Country. I fucking loved the guy before I’d heard a note.

I still have the album, and even listen to it on occasion. But while it was refreshingly traditional (as the name sort of promised), it wasn’t really anything extraordinary. Just a decent country album for those evenings when hard liquor and a decent country album were called for.

I lost track of Shooter Jennings altogether until Thanksgiving morning, this year. An old friend and reader turned me onto a track from an album called Black Ribbons that he released last year, at which time he was calling his band Hierophant.

I’m not sure where to begin. First of all, it’s a concept album, narrated by Stephen King, playing the role of a renegade radio host, a sort of Alex Jones character, who is standing his ground to do one final broadcast before being forcibly shut down by government censorship. The story is all really just a “masquerade,” as Jennings called it, with the decay of trust in a society providing a sort of inverse metaphor to examine the value of trust and love in a personal relationship between two people.

Not a traditional country album.

In fact, it easily draws comparisons to the likes of Nine Inch Nails, David Bowie, Pink Floyd, and even Kanye West. It’s all over the place, and it all works.

The opening track, Wake Up, starts with Jennings slowly singing a haunting line over a sparse piano melody, singing not like a country singer, but rather like Ziggy Stardust under a single spotlight towards the end of a decadent opera: They say good fences… make good neighbors… for you, my friend… this might be true… And then the rhythm picks up as he twists the knife: …But you still gotta put / bars on the window to the soul inside of you. Synthesizers, of all things, kick in, along with a simple beat as the glam-space-rock song builds up, preaching against the widespread brainwashing of society via the media. Then, suddenly, the sky cracks wide open, and a stomp riff heavier than God, like something off of a Black Sabbath album comes crashing down. The jaw-dropping transition to full-on stoner metal (and back) just makes the slow, smoldering parts just that much more sharply insidious. The outro features Jennings hissing: Life is a movie / we are all actors / Don’t let them edit you out.

After that first track is the first of Stephen King’s transmissions as “Will O’The Wisp,” calling on the “truth seekers,” promising the “last breath of free speech,” and music in contrast to the usual “processed bubble-gum bullshit churned out by the overlords of doublespeak and meant to turn a gray world grayer.” Then he introduces Triskaidekaphobia, a near-perfect hybrid of folk, rock, and pop, featuring a backup chorus. Somehow the track flows seamlessly into Don’t Feed The Animals, a distorted, howling, pissed-off cut like something that clawed its way out of Trent Reznor’s studio. It should contrast like toothpaste and orange juice, but there’s an energy that ties it all together and helps it to come off like a great mixtape. Even as The Breaking Point follows the assault, a bluesy slow jam that’s four parts Hunky Dory to one part Texas Flood.

After another transmission from Will O’The Wisp, Everything Else Is Illusion is the first of the next block of songs, a dirty cross between The Beatles’ Come Together and Marilyn Manson’s Mechanical Animals. Again, pretty much the farthest thing from country imaginable, yet it’s followed by the opposite: God Bless Alabama. By being just what you’d expect it to be, it becomes strange in the way that Marilyn Munster was by being the normal one at home among weirdos.

That set closes with the album’s centerpiece, and the song that I first discovered, All Of This Could Have Been Yours. It was a great place to start, because, while not giving too many surprises away, it encapsulates most of the best the album has to offer. I knew of Shooter Jennings the country singer, yet here he is singing a blues rock ballad over a piano, with squealing guitar leads weaving in and out like something from Wish You Were Here:

Again, despite the wild variation between sounds, Black Ribbons stays anchored not only by the themes of the concept album, but by that energy that seems to replenish itself as each song builds on the one before it. That thread is the X-factor, the elusive “it” that some albums have and most others just don’t. Had this album not come from a genuine place, a truly inspired soul, it would have fallen limp and disjointed, a hodgepodge of mismatched influences without focus. And there are just a couple of parts that sort of seem to have been thrown in just to prove a point, namely the trash-rap-shithead mockery that is Fuck You I’m Famous. But with everything in proper context, the album flirts with masterpiece status, taking the listener on the sort of musical journey that only comes along a handful of times a decade.

In the second half of the album, that journey winds through some strange territory. Lights In The Sky fuses a Doobie-esque groove together with ping-ponging synth bleeps and bloops and auto-tuned backups, while Summer Of Rage sounds like Yeezy producing a Year Zero song with Jennings sneaking in Mark Lanegan impressions. The Illuminated takes all of that and mixes it together with some of those shades of Bowie and Floyd we heard earlier. And in the midst of all of this, you’ll find the title track, a stripped-down, forlorn acoustic number, as well as the straightforward rocker California Via Tennessee, like something off of the Stones’ Sticky Fingers.

Black Ribbons closes its story with When The Radio Goes Dead, and I can’t help but betray my rank as desert rock geek by comparing it to the Alain Johannes obscurity Making A Cross; It’s got precisely the same sort of vocal melody that clearly bids a sad goodbye even if sung in an alien language. Between that and an instrumental reprisal of All Of This Could Have Been Yours that serves as the closing credits, Will O’The Wisp’s final transmission ends, and I’ll say nothing more to spoil that.

Discovering this album a year after its release is disappointing only in the sense that we didn’t get a chance to help Jennings’ first week sales, or recognize it in our obligatory “best of the year” lists. But the album is no less relevant or enjoyable a year later, nor will it be five more years from now. It joins the ranks of Silverchair’s Diorama, the Deftones’ White Pony, and Kanye’s Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy as the sort of great album that surprised everyone, coming from the least likely of places, establishing not only its artist but indeed its very genre of being capable of delivering more than we’d expected.

You know how in comic books, certain costumes got passed down over the years through a series of alter-egos? Like Batman had three different Robins, there were five Flashes, and like a million Green Lanterns? Well if Bruce Springsteen were to somehow get killed in the next Infinite Crisis, I think Tom Morello would make a great new The Boss. Especially if New Jersey were to somehow come out of the story arc without that godawful New Jersey smell, I bet its residents would be able turn a blind eye to the fact that Morello is actually from Harlem, and accept him as an honorable one their own.

I’ve never been a huge Springsteen fan (despite growing up just over the bridge), but the fantasy started when a guest appearance by Morello made me one for a day. And I went back to it after hearing track four, Night Falls. Granted, I’m biased, but what I’d love to hear on the next Morello album is a rocker or two a la Born In The USA, or a well crafted pop song a la Dancing In The Dark- that would totally seal it for me.

But I’ll stop daydreaming about The Boss v2.0, and get back to The Fabled City. It is good; Morello has a voice worth using, the songwriting is above par across the board, and the music is more dynamic than that of his debut solo effort, One Man Revolution. The second track, Whatever It Takes, almost comes close to some combination of my two wishes, being rather upbeat and groovy, stomping around at times over a riff that’s ever so vaguely reminiscent of something off of Rage Against The Machine’s fourth album.

Saint Isabelle and The Iron Wheel channel the Irish section of Morello’s diverse heritage, both backed by raucous whiskey-stained balladry.

I almost love track three, The King Of Hell, with music that, while minimal, is beautifully composed. I just find the chorus a bit repetitive. Lazarus On Down features backup vocals by Serj Tankian of System Of A Down, but I’ve been completely over him for quite some time, and I doubt even his big fans would consider his contribution little more than a splash of background color.

To be perfectly honest, I’ll probably forget about this album for the most part as soon as this review is finally done and published. But it’s certainly respectable, and will likely figure in to my decision next time Morello is playing somewhere cool around LA; I’ve seen him before and I’ll surely see him again. He’s a talented man, and if you’re into folk music- or if you liked One Man Revolution- The Fabled City is one to check out.

The Fabled City
September 30th, 2008
Epic

1. The Fabled City
2. Whatever It Takes
3. The King Of Hell
4. Night Falls
5. The Lights Are On In Spidertown
6. Midnight In The City Of Destruction
7. Saint Isabelle
8. Lazarus On Down
9. Gone Like Rain
10. The Iron Wheel
11. Rise To Power