Review Summary: If you can get past some growing pains due to Hole being left to do nigh everything on his own, you'll find one of his most consistent and inspired works, impressive for a man this late into his career.
And so, here we are. Dave Hole's ninth studio album, so long-awaited and delayed that even an interview of him claiming it would be out "in a couple of months" was from 2017. While the decade long gap is hard to explain just on its own, observing the aspirations of Goin' Back Down will quickly tell you why it took Hole longer than average to produce; it's because the "produce" part is literal this time around. Self-produced, self-engineered and mostly self-performed, it is an album made for curveballs and surprises. A seventy year old Australian slide guitarist stepping into the studio and doing everything himself? It could only be a real surprise or a real disaster. I'm happy to report Hole used his extra breathing room to great effect, even with very noticeable tumbles along the way.
First of all, with exception to four tracks (These Blues..., Bobby's Rock, Used To Be, Tears For No Reason), Hole purportedly played everything himself or else used loops and samples. While I'm not sure if I entirely believe that with moments like Shake Your Money Maker, with so much drum spontaneity it'd make the Outside Looking In drummer give an aside glance, I don't have a problem with this approach on principle. The idea of building blues jams around looped sections as building blocks actually works well for the repetitive nature of all the soloing of the genre, and the fact that you can barely tell the difference speaks to both its great use here and the arguable superfluousness of staying "legit" throughout his entire career up to this point.
Even then, however, Hole knew to keep it lean and clean, which makes Goin' Back Down more than the sum of its parts. At fourty six minutes, it's tight, consistent and leaves you hungry for more, or just scrambling for the replay button, as opposed to just riding the album out for the duration. It's Hole's shortest album, but I'm glad he didn't throw everything he could think of on there, as is the common fear of a late-game "self-focused" record. And what he did manage to think of? Pretty sublime stuff.
The opening track is more electric blues goodness, but with the twist of samples and self-production leading to good gaps between bouts of song to drive tension and atmosphere, and a fairly unique reverb effect on the vocals and some nice grit on the guitar. Most of the blues-focused cuts are above par on this album, really. Shake Your Money Maker hits hard for how brisk it sounds, and Bobby's Rock is another great send-up of Elmore James that Hole still manages to make his. Back Door Man also stands out as a nice rough and tumble blues jumble, with an actual chorus, and shows off a bit more of Hole's evolution as a guitarist.
For a man with as restrictive a playing style as one-finger slide over the fretboard, which one would think would hamper your accessibility, his breadth of techniques, feels and sounds has gone up and down over the years, but Goin' Back Down strikes a nice balance between clean playing and dirty shredding and sliding. Every solo at least feels like a nugget of fabulous fretwork, and while he's missing the rock and roll touches of Short Fuse Blues and Outside Looking In, he knows how to pace himself and when to really go hard on the guitar. It remains engaging the whole way through, a rare feat even for him.
But it's on some of the other cuts where things get really interesting, with songs with more obvious influences outside of the world of blues. Measure Of A Man has a dingy singer-songwriter quality to it, with a dobro-sounding instrument carrying a solemn track that...might be about dissing Donald Trump? It contains his only ever use of a swear word, and it absolutely hits harder than usual. Arrows In The Dark is so much different from anything else Hole put out; a 60s pop-rock influenced break-up/reunion song with dual self-harmonies the whole way through. Even further than the likes of Insomniac, and yet Hole still nails it with great delivery, transplanting his slide guitar skills and his gruff voice into a genre that actually works really well for it. The track is moody yet very melodic, and somewhat catchy. Reminds me a lot of Mr. Tambourine Man by The Byrds.
But the big surprise comes right before the end, with Tears For No Reason. Hole trades in his slide guitar for a nylon string acoustic, built for an arpeggio-laden morose number where Hole laments about a woman in his life currently facing depression. Despite some moments of unintentional self-aggrandization in the lyrics, it's surprisingly legit. The guitar winds around a smooth, static synth string choir with one of Hole's best vocal performances. The man has produced many moments of great music, but this is by far his most beautiful piece.
In general, I'm surprised at Hole's wisdom and tact. For a man who has written many, many break-up anthems, he has a fair number of songs in his repertoire referencing wider issues from a distance, acknowledging his personal luck in the process. Too Little Too Late is the perfect endgame to this lyrical view, implicitly comparing the threshold of irreversible climate change to a relationship beyond broken in a way that isn't tacky, and These Blues Are Here To Stay, which immediately follows, is likely a double meaning as a result. Hole expresses concern at the dying of the old guard of blues rock in several press interviews, but here is aware there will always be a place for it, and likely because of the sad reality that the problems that cause people to write and play the blues aren't going away.
So with all this praise towards Hole's awareness, tastefulness and eye for quality and detail, what drags Goin' Back Down from being his best work? In a sense, himself. Or to be more precise, his production work. The instrumentals sound fine, and in fact, certain songs give the guitar more body, grit and character. But Hole apparently had to be walked through the production and engineering process, and in some instances, it shows. Glaringly. As someone so bad at detecting "loudness war" albums that the only album that sounds obvious to me is Renegades by Rage Against The Machine, I'm stunned I could pick up where the vocals obviously wall and clip because when it gets to that point, it shouldn't even be on the final mix. Too Little Too Late's chorus double-tracked vocals are almost ruined by sound crunch; it just sounds like a low bitrate render. These Blues is even worse; so much detail is lost in the walling. Combined with a slightly off-kilter band, it makes for one Hole's worst studio recordings in a long time.
Even if I didn't think the 'loops and samples' approach worked for what Hole was doing, I'd have serious concerns for the backing band he does bring on this time around. Bob Patient, the man behind the piano, turns in some very off-kilter performances. There are notable points on Used To Be where he is out of time, and for a genre about stability and riding grooves, the consistency of the playing matters just as much as the passion you put into your performance. And again, it highlights how superfluous the idea of the full band suite can be when, aside from saxophonist Paul Millard, the organically performed tracks from seasoned session musicians don't sound that much better or worse than the tracks where Hole alone leads the charge.
But frankly? I still prefer Hole taking risks that don't quite work as opposed to just hammering out blues jams, especially this late in his career when an identity like his should be defied as much as revered and adhered to. Hole's website sells this album as something for both newcomers and die-hard Dave Hole fans, and against all odds, I'm inclined to believe it. It's not quite his best; Outside Looking In does more with even less, and even Short Fuse Blues and Ticket To Chicago possess a pizzazz Goin' Back Down partially lacks. But against the album it reminds me of the most, Under The Spell, it's a much more successful venture into a focus on more personal songwriting and darker, dingier, distorted sonic backdrops, and somehow still more fun at that. I expect the man to have more years yet in him when it comes to touring, but with the long time it took to get to Goin' Back Down, I would not be surprised if this is his last studio album. If this is the end, it's a satisfying conclusion to a long and meaty lineup of electric charged blues efforts, and it only reinforces my eternal respect for Australia's biggest and best bluesman.
