Pale Sun, Crescent Moon Merrill WI

Pale Sun, Crescent Moon

Cowboy Junkies

RCA Records, 1993

REVIEW BY: Sean McCarthy

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED: 12/05/1997

Just about anyone can make a case against the 30th anniversaryissue of Rolling Stone, "The Women in Rock." The editors stated thatsome key figures in rock were not featured because of past reviewsthat the magazine gave the artists. Patti Smith had a morepolitical reason: making a big deal out of women genderizes thegenre instead of focusing on the work of the artist.

I'll forgo bitching about the writers not including Tori Amos'smasterpiece Little Earthquakes among the most important albums by thesewomen artists and focus on a glaring omission for this review:theCowboy Junkies. True, three-fourths of the band are males, but thestaple of the band is Margo Timmins' delicate, often hauntedvoice.

After making a huge breakthrough with The Trinity Sessions, the Cowboy Junkies released two otheralbums. The Caution Horses and Black Eyed Man further showcased the Cowboy Junkies waymellow style. Often acoustic and a tempo best suited for shaking ahangover on a Sunday morning, those two albums were strictly "fansonly" type of albums. Sadly, those albums were more mood music thanworks that could stand on their own.

A change in formula was needed for the band. And that's whatcame out of the 1993 release, Pale Sun, Crecent Moon. Starting off on a dissonant note,"Crecent Moon" gave a slight agitation to their previous efforts.The Junkies had some guest musicians play harmonica, mandolin andpiano in a couple of the songs, giving them more texture than mostof the songs on Black Eyed Man. That's not to say they didn't use theseinstruments before, they just utilized them more on Pale Sun, Crecent Moon.