“The indomitable Johnny Dowd is a 62-year-old from New York State who didn’t cut a record till he was 50. He’s making up for lost time with ‘Wake Up The Snakes,’ a soupy, soulful, dangerous, dirty career best. His band strike an excellent groove which lasts all the way from the funk-meets-half-spoken growl of opener ‘Yolanda’ to the smokin’ finale ‘Organ Grinder.’ Dowd’s got all the swagger and star quality of acts a third his age.”

“Oh, pity those poor punctilious critics who must have a place for everything, everything in its place, because when it comes to Johnny Dowd they are reduced to train wrecks at their PC screens, ears bleeding in confusion at the curious din spilling from their speakers. They thought he was alt country; they thought he was gothic blues; they thought he was some weird hybrid of rock and soul, when Dowd is in fact all and none of these.

    If he has a kindred spirit out there, it’s probably Jackie Leven, another maverick who disappears in a puff of smoke just whenever they’ve got him cornered. ‘Wake Up the Snakes’ is Dowd’s latest disappearing act, a beautiful mess of mutant genres underscored by the voice of a very dangerous man indeed, kind of like Lou Reed’s unhinged sibling, a voice that finds its perfect anima in that of Kim Sherwood-Caso on ‘Lies,’ ‘Hello Happiness,’ and ‘Swamp Woman.’ ”

“The snakes never sleep in the music of Johnny Dowd. One of the great mavericks of contemporary music, the Texan-born, Ithaca, New York-based singer, songwriter, guitarist and purveyor of absurd and twisted tales of the American underbelly didn’t start his recording career until his 49th year. Now 62 and onto his tenth studio album, the man with a voice like a booze-addled death row inmate and a mind like an existential pulp novelist is still setting his deathly imaginings among rusty blade roots-rock that is equal parts Cash, Cave, Waits and something all his own which is definitively gothic, but definitely not goth.

    The former US army veteran and removal man’s latest is a back-to-basics affair, recorded quickly with Dowd’s crack band and taking its cue from the 60s garage and soul records that first forged his love of music. . . . As always, this grey-haired, dapper and slightly scary man takes human agony and madness to such an extreme that he dares you to laugh—and then destroys any potential irony with harsh and terrible truths. Therein lay the snakes.”

“Some of these 13 new songs make you want to frug and shimmy: ‘Words of Love’; ‘Swamp Woman,’ with its parping organ; ‘Yolanda,’ with Dowd channelling his inner ’60s soul man. The rest are cool, sludgy, funny, chilling (the psycho ‘Voices’), weird (‘Organ Grinder’) and—in duets with Kim Sherwood-Caso—familiar.”

“After 2008's roaring ‘A Drunkard’s Masterpiece,’ Dowd clearly has the taste for a full band workout. ‘Wake Up The Snakes’ is a throwback to the days when soul and garage rock first collided, ripping along to farfisa and head-slapping guitar with messy abandon.”

"Johnny Dowd is like some self-mutating virus of American music, restlessly bringing fresh twists to old forms, absorbing influences. The likes of Beefheart and The Residents have informed his warped alt.country/rock for years, and stirred in here are elements of The Doors, Miles's serrated Seventies avant-jazz, Los Lobos, doowop and a snatch of Deep Purple's most renowned riff. The album is presented as three opuses of four or five segued songs apiece; the theme is, as usual, the war of the sexes, accompanied in 'Random Thoughts' and 'Unintended Consequences' by ruminations on 'civilization and its discontents,' among them Bukowski, existentialism and Fred Astaire.

All feature Dowd's blend of high tragedy and low comedy, embodied in the cynical charm of lines like 'Poetry is the path to hell, accompanied by the sound of wedding bells.' But then, who else but maybe Frank Zappa would do a song about 'the sacred bond between audience and performer' and call it 'Union of Idiots'?"

Hellwood: Chainsaw of Life

"Unholy trinity featuring Jim White and Johnny Dowd: Uniting the low-growling Dowd—like a dog stirring from slumber—with White's threatening whispers has long been a mutual ambition. Recorded in a New York cabin with third member Willie B, this is devil's music with a compassionate core. Dowd may cry 'lust and depravity'" on 'Thomas Dorsey,' but the likes of 'A Man Loves His Wife'—in which a faded wedding dress in the closet and loaded pistols in the drawer trace a decaying marriage—are almost unbearably poignant."

"Their voices are chalk and cheese. . . Johnny Dowd's is an earthy rumble, Jim White's is a reedy moan. But this meeting of two great outsiders is a master class in noirish ruminations from the deep south set to soupy, funked-up rock 'n' soul. . . Joining them in their imaginary nightmare outpost of Hellwood, population 3, is multi-instrumentalist Willie B. Between them, they kick up an unholy racket."

"'Cruel Words' may be the greatest album of his career."

"From the opening number, 'House of Pain,' with its retro keyboards, screaming noir chords, big drums and spoken-word lyrics about rearranged brains and 'that thing between his legs,' this is classic Dowd territory: perverse, musically delirious and blackly funny."

"Johnny and his fine backing band get into the groove from the start. The recording bursts with vitality."

"It's great, wildly creative, uncompromising music."

"It’s a stripped-down revved-up sound, something you might encounter if the Bates Motel in 'Psycho' had a lounge. . . 'Cruel Words' is the best album he’s made."

"Nice title, nicer sleeve—Dowd in a graveyard, debonair in sharp black suit and brogues, poking the dirt with his electric guitar. Whatever's lurking down there appears to have been dug up and set to spooky blues, finger-popping jazz or a cheerful cluttery cacophony of beatniky sounds that wouldn't be out of place on a Tom Waits record. Upbeat opener Brother Jim, the disturbing Dear John Letter and Dylan's Coat and Rest in Peace, with their spoken word vocals, sound like a Waitsian wake being held on unhallowed ground. . . . Wonderfully warped yet remarkably accessible."

"The ramshackle cacophony of the opening Brother Jim sets the tone, with Dowd sounding like some deranged revivalist preacher accompanied by The Magic Band and The Shaggs as he notes gloomily how 'Life gets meaner and meaner as the years stumble by.' From there on, the shadow of he grave is never far away until the final berserk polka instrumental Rip Off affords a little wordless solace. Not that Dowd's worldview is entirely bereft of humour, albeit the mordant gallows humour of Christmas is Just Another Day, where he effects a brilliant commingling of the pathetic and the bathetic, tempering his initial moan that 'I'm too sad to be gay / Christmas is just another day / Someone else's holiday' with the patently insincere admonition, 'Don't forget your mom at Christmas / It's a mother's special day.' "

"There's few crumbs of comfort to chew on in these songs, which confront the suicidal horror of the proletarian American experience with a fearlessness that wipes away any illusions about the fabled American Dream.

Take the opening, title-track, which creeps in on the back of a desultory drumbeat and noise collage intermittently lacerated with shards of tortured electric guitar as Dowd drawls his tale of a wretched adulterous liaison: 'They checked into a motel in a little town called Paradise/ It had air-conditioning and television and a Magic Finger king-sized bed/ They lay down in a frenzy like rats engulfed in flames/ Flowers, old wire flowers, will not obliterate their shame.' The juxtaposition of the mockingly ironic detail - the town called Paradise, the Magic Finger bed, the old wire flowers - with the revulsion of 'rats engulfed by flames' gives the song a visceral power that makes you want to wash your hands in absolution after you've heard it."

"With its intoxicating psychobilly, violent musical convulsions and cacaphonous garage-punk, The Pawnbroker's Wife is plenty dark, but there are also some of Dowd's most accessible songs. From the retro pop of 'I Love You' and country duet 'Separate Beds' through Lee Hazelwood cover 'Sleeping in the Grass' and ballad 'True Love.' The latter is a murder ballad, but it's the man who's killed. "

"Bolstered by instruments that sound as if they had been abandoned by a travelling circus, each of the 14 cuts is imprinted with an indelibly individual character. A persistent strain of blue-collar Expressionism also runs through the album. . . . Not only is he a master at exposing the unsettling underside of everyday life, he also makes the commonplace seem anything but."

"If Willie Nelson turned into Mr. Hyde, he'd be Johnny Dowd. Backwoods Gothic tales of love, death, and a perverse God arrive with a twang and a junkyard clatter, reaching for laughs that grow uneasy."

"Though Dowd came across more like an Appalachian anachronism with the bare-bones murder balladry of 1997's 'Wrong Side of Memphis' debut, here he seems like a visionary, putting an X-ray to the underbelly of Americana, finding a strain of creepiness that extends from the carnival to the cocktail lounge to the country honky-tonk. . . . My two favorite albums thus far in '99 are Moby's techno spiritual 'Play' and this. Moby is heaven; Dowd is hell."

"A moving man from Ithaca, New York, embarks on the scariest ride of the year in this homemade work of genius."

Live Performances