B.Knox - Heartbreak & Landscape (2020)

Aformer schoolteacher from Newfoundland, now based in Ontario, B.Knox only made the switch from marking to music last year (introduced on Folk Radio here), this being his debut album, the title an apt description of the thematic content of the songs within. Longing and forbidden love (that will “stay with us a lifetime/But it won’t last the night”) are the subjects of the album opener, the slow walk paced, vocally keening Americana of Deep Dark Love featuring producer Aaron Goldstein on pedal steel.

More musically muscular with its guitars to the fore, Corners is about finding a purpose in your life but not knowing where to start and just painting yourself into a corner while the clock’s ticking away before Aaron Comeau’s keys picks up the mood with the soulful country of Stars and Burnt Bridges with its weary resignation (“Please, take me home/I don’t want to be out here anymore/My eyes are heavy, my heart is too”) of a stagnated relationship (“Our love is a distant star/That burned out long ago/Stare into the embers of a burning bridge/Smoke rising into the afterglow”) where you “Cover up the heartbreak with the blanket of a smile”.

While I wasn’t overly taken with Living With A Shadow, a slinky bluesy groove with organ and drum motors, Best Laid Plans, from whence the album title comes, had me back on board with its driving rhythm, slide guitar work and lead solo as he describes a toxic relationship as where “We can be both liars/As well as the deceived”.

The Fault Lies slows it down with pedal steel again echoing the emotions in the song and underscoring the dusty country flavours, A Different Sound having a smoky Willie Nelson flavour and both Take The Keys (“I watch the world go by/From the passenger side/A witness to my own life/Think I should take the keys/It’s time for me to drive”) and Wishbone (“You can’t make these rooms a home/Hearts get tangled/Like sheets on a bed/Leave the past behind/For the one that lays ahead”) keeping things on a looming break-up trajectory.

Echoingly sung with guitar to match, for some reason, the mood of Second Spark reminds me of Hotel California, the lyric almost certainly as oppressive in its vision of an emotional wasteland where “the mascots for the dying…keep a weathered eye/On the horizon or the bar stools/Where their loved ones sit and cry…As they disappear into the air”.

It doesn’t get too much cheerier in its final stretch, the downcast, sparsely accompanied The Darkest Night populated by “prowling old ghosts without homes/Sad looking spirits covered in skin”, reflecting on the ashes of a relationship and where parting paths have led (“I hope that you learned how to make yourself happy/And how to keep yourself sane/I wonder if you’re making breakfast/Kissing the new man you love”), ending with the bitter note of “while you’re out in the sunshine/Laughing with all your new friends/Remember that they can’t be bothered to keep you/Any safer than I kept you then”.

It ends with the six-minute burner of Hurricane Breeze, funeral march drum beat and low howling organ and guitar conjuring a sense of foreboding as “Mother’s all hold children tight to their breast/While the men of the sea battle their death/There’s no telling who will be dragged to the depths”, the storm coming in from the sea feeling like a metaphor for the tempests of life and loss where “Lost to the madness or found on the shoals/There’s no telling who has been swept to the cold.”

It took him a while to stop just writing songs for himself and to have the confidence that others might want to listen to what he had to say. This album is ample evidence of why they will.