Koch Records
2001
Temporary Shelter
About This Album
If there are any contemporary songwriters who look deeper into the dark and troubling underside American life than Johnny Dowd, I'm not sure anyone has the courage to listen to their work. Dowd's music comes from a place that's at once singularly disturbing and easy to recognize, charting a landscape of murder, obsession, misguided love, guilt, fear, and betrayal that's as common, as violent, and as familiar as the morning newspaper. Dowd's first album, Wrong Side of Memphis, was a stark, blunt homemade affair, while the follow-up, Pictures From Life's Other Side, was a (relatively) high-fidelity companion piece that captured the Dock Boggs-meets-Pere Ubu sound of Dowd's touring band (Justin Asher on keyboards, Brian Wilson on drums and bass pedals, and Kim Sherwood-Caso on vocals). Temporary Shelter, however, finds Johnny Dowd displaying his surest hand in the record-making process to date; while Dowd's production is simple and uncluttered, he and his band have also learned how to layer their sheets of sound in the studio, and while the album still possesses the jarring intimacy of Dowd's live shows, there's also a subtlety and broader sonic palette that brings the details of this music into sharper and more telling focus.
Track List (try tracks 1,2,3,4,5,8 and 10)

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