http://www.villagevoice.com/blogs/st...new_johnny.php
New Johnny Cash Album Will Tear Your Soul Apart
American IV is one of my top forty or so favorite albums of all time, so I wasn't particularly thrilled with the news that we'd be getting another album of Rubin collabos. The artist's-death cottage-industry is nothing new; ask Tupac. And Cash's estate has been flooding the market with best-ofs and box sets and unreleased material since his death, but I'm not especially mad at that; he was, after all, a national treasure, and that's just what you do when a national treasure dies. But American IV had such an air of finality that I didn't want anyone fucking with it. The book was closed, and they should just walk away. But American V: A Hundred Highways, which drops on the fourth of July, is nearly as great as American IV. It's just as suffused with death and grief and regret as its predecessor, and it's just as sad and gorgeous. Cash recorded it in the months between June's death and his own, and he did away with all the alt-rock covers and marquee-name guests. There's a cover of Bruce Springsteen's "Further On (Up the Road)," but the album mostly sticks with traditionals and Cash originals. And they're all about dying, of course. Cash's voice is still tough and sinewy, but you can hear the age in it for the first time, the breath intakes and soft quivers. Rubin keeps all the arrangements from getting within Cash's way except when he needs them to beef things up, like the ominous Angels of Light drum-stomp on the apocalyptic gospel burner "God's Gonna Cut You Down." And there's a lot of stuff about not wanting to go yet: "Oh Lord, help me walk another mile." Three songs are addressed to God, and a lot of the others are love songs; everything is just crushingly, unbearably sad. The song that sticks with me the most is "On the Evening Train," a ballad about a man watching his wife's coffin leaving on a train: "I pray that God will give me courage to carry on till we meet again / It's hard to know she's gone forever / They're carrying her home on the evening train." Some of the other songs are about personal failures, the sort of stuff that I can imagine just tearing you up when you know your time is short. It's summer, and it's a lot more fun to listen to Lily Allen and Field Mob and Brightblack Morning Light than some excoriating edge-of-mortality stuff like this. American V is one of the most depressing albums I've ever heard, and I wouldn't recommend it to anyone who's not ready to be depressed. But if you're worried that it's a crass money-grab, stop worrying. Still, don't buy it until July 5th. This is not barbecue material.