EXCELLENT ALBUM PILLORIES THE GUILTY
Everybody Smoke in Hell
(four stars)
John Carroll & The Epic Proportions
(Independent)
The cover art - a Gustave Dore engraving for Dante's Inferno showing sinners condemned to spend eternity upside down in flaming rock - suggests that John Carroll may be annoyed with wrong-doers. Sure enough, the excellent third album by the Ottawa country blues/folk man, who sometimes sounds uncannily like Mississippi John Hurt, pillories the guilty.
On the title track, it's the religiously righteous. The wealthy one per-centers scorned by the Occupy movement get soundly scolded in the rattling Piggy. And our tendency to overrate the intellectural elite is skewered from the vantage point of a paid but ignored house party entertainer in The Party.
Carroll is a wry, observant musician who elsewhere tackles perennially favorite subjects like a free-spending gal and, in the driving Frontal Lobotomy Blues, the dangers of television addiction.
(In addition to the CD launch tonight at the Black Sheep Inn, Carroll plays the Chateau Lafayette in the ByWard Market every Wednesday.)