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On his fouth full-lenth, he's supported by a cast of returning players from his 2003 breakthrough release. Embracing great traditions of American music from Appalachian folk, southwestern blues, country, and good old rock 'n' roll, Crooked Fingers take their place alongside artists as respected as Bruce Springsteen, Calexico, and Wilco, while maintaining a kinship with new storytellers.Reviews:
Who'd have figured that when Eric Bachmann finally shed the Tom Waits husk that'd covered his once gawky squawk it would reveal... Neil Diamond? The former Archers of Loaf frontman, d.b.a. Crooked Fingers since the beginning of the '00s, has brought each of his new outfit's albums closer to scoring the spaghetti western playing in his head. So much so, in fact, that Crooked Fingers' fifth release starts off with "Islero," which plays like instrumental opening credits music. Hardly new territory for Bachmann, who issued two vocal-free albums in the '90s under the moniker Barry Black, and it fits Dignity and Shame's overtly cinematic approach-as an overture to a morality tale.Yes, Bachmann is becoming something of a moralist. Not the puritanical kind, thank goodness, yet he's still more homiletic than before, a shift foreshadowed by the cover of Queen and David Bowie's "Under Pressure" on 2000's Reservoir Songs EP that highlighted the song's "Why can't we give love?" bridge. On "Twilight Creeps," he spells it out mid-song: "Why's everybody always act so tough/ When all anybody wants is to find a friend?/ Why does everybody always try to hide the heart that, hidden, has no use?" Still, Bachmann's ear for the baroque (the arrangements are still very much in the junkshop-orchestra vein of 2003's Red Devil Dawn) continues to be matched by his eye for the macabre, as on the title track: "There's a man in your hand/ He's got nothing good to sell you/ And he's smashing a violin against your bed/ To be sure, there ain't no cure/ He comes creeping back to beg you/ As a thousand gargoyles crash into his head."
