Another slice of Johnny Dowd’s dearly beloved mutant music is always worth celebrating and Homemade Pie is no exception. The 13 songs here are all gloriously fucked up – stewed in a hotchpotch of 60’s garage band riffs, off kilter country, badass guitars and kaleidoscopic killer clown like melodies – just another day in the Dowd household we’d love to imagine.
Anyhow, Homemade Pie picks off from where 2019’s Family Picnic left off, with Dowd sticking to the basics and eschewing the even weirder homemade electronica which featured on albums such as That’s Your Wife On The Back Of My Horse and Do The Gargon. With his regular crew on board (Mike Edmondson on guitars and keyboard, Willie B on drums and the wonderfully dead pan vocals of Kim Sherwood Caso), Dowd stands proud on the rubble of his songs, waving his freak flag high.
That said, Dowd’s songs, for all their waywardness, have a way of worming themselves into your brain. He grabs a genre, subverts it and launches it right back at you. It might have been put through a mincing machine in the process but there’s still a whole load of nourishment to be had. Gone is a fine example as Dowd writes a tour diary of sorts in the manner of Bukowski while the band deliver a skewed 50’s like doo-wop feel. Silk Scarf is another nod to past rock’n’roll with Dowd’s droll delivery perfectly matched by Sherwood Caso’s cool injunctions while You Can Call Me The Wind takes the likes of Lee Hazlewood and Nancy Sinatra’s duets into another dimension. Uncle Jimmy kicks off with the melody from Benny Spellman’s Fortune Teller and pounds it into submission, aided by a stabbing organ riff and sulphurous guitar as Dowd merely repeats the one line lyric throughout. The opening title song is a grand slice of Nuggets type garage rock with Dowd a travelling salesman doomed to dwell in a Flannery O’Connor story.
With its woozy fairground delivery, Out For Blood is a menacing tale which kind of takes the story of Badlands and transposes it into a meeting of an itinerant singer and an obsessed fan. That fairground waltz is repeated on the surreal ramblings of Rick Ross, a song which is probably the weirdest ever about a man and his dog (or his God as he wonders). God himself has abandoned Dowd on the claustrophobic cluster which is Shack and the closing song, Do Me Do is perhaps the most broken down and fractured lost love song you will hear this year. Even the guitar solo here sounds broken hearted. We do have to mention the behemoth, nestled within the album, which is the fully pumped up garage band workout, Rise Up. A splendidly raucous song with Dowd at his snarling best, he insists he loves his country, right or wrong while describing the desecration of its values, all the while rising to the declamation, “Fuck Donald Trump, Donald Trump is a fool.” No pussyfooting here (and no radio play) but at least it’s nice to know that Johnny Dowd is on the side of the righteous and long may he deliver his missives from the USA’s underbelly. They are songs from the gutter, staring at the stars.