Album Review: All That Reckoning by Cowboy Junkies

It's remarkable in itself that in 2018, the Cowboy Junkies still have the same lineup that recorded their debut album, Whites Off Earth Now!!, in 1986. But it's even more surprising that more than three decades into their career, the band's essential formula remains very much the same, and what's more, that it still works. Released in 2018, All That Reckoning is less spare and severe than the group's most celebrated early material, with the occasional report of a jagged synthesizer or electric guitar, but even though the arrangements are more fleshed-out and the production more ambitious, the Cowboy Junkies continue to lay out languid, contemplative melodies favoring the low end of the register, with the rich but spectral vocals of Margo Timmins drizzled over the top like honey.

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At the beginning of the decade, Cowboy Junkies released four LPs in just over a year-and-a-half by recording sessions quickly and live-off-the-floor. These albums, known as The Nomad Series, were lauded for the way they captured a raw dynamism that the quartet hasn't possessed since their breakthrough 1988 opus, The Trinity Session.   With the release of their 16th album, All That Reckoning, the Toronto group craft something simple, passionate and visceral. Much of the album's 11 tracks play off songwriter Michael Timmins' patient ….

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The obvious response to the 30th anniversary of the release of Cowboy Junkies' still-mesmerizing milestone The Trinity Session would have been for them to repeat 2007's Trinity Revisited, this time with a remastered package and a series of gigs with the record played in full. Instead, this wonderfully idiosyncratic band has elected to move always-forward with an album that's every bit as wonderful as the collection that first brought them to our attention. All That Reckoning is an album that more than lives up to its title, for here Cowboy Junkies take stock of the political, social and personal situations that add up to that great big thing called life in the 21st century.

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