Herald Nix

Everybody Loves You (Northern Electric)

The version of “Auld Lang Syne” that closes Everybody Loves You discards both its familiar melody and the lines about “old acquaintance”¦never brought to mind”. Whatever the reasoning behind this (and maybe there isn’t any), it lends a certain bitterness to the song. The fact that you can hear Nix breathing so clearly and heavily on the track draws the listener even closer to the sucking vortex of the singer’s weird parallel universe—a place where music this extraordinary slips out every couple of years almost entirely unnoticed.

Nix has been dabbling with various roots-oriented styles since the early ’80s, but Everybody Loves You—which is being touted by those in the know as Nix’s best ever—builds on his 2005 release Soul of a Kiss, relying mostly on the variations Nix and his backing musicians can find inside a single chord. This reductive philosophy extends to the album cover, which features the same inscrutable photograph of the treelike Nix as the previous album, suggesting that the Salmon Arm artist has settled firmly into his personal lake-country blues idiom.

Musically, there are fewer dirges here, but Nix and his band still sound like they’re setting the woods on fire in “Outside the Death House”, “Night’s Black Bridge”, and “Ruby”. By contrast, “Nobody’s Laughing Now” is exquisitely pretty, while the remarkable “Come On Dog” defies description. Otherworldly, sad, and incredibly seductive, Everybody Loves You is, yet again, the work of a genuine and fully formed original talent.