Stranger In My Land

It acts as an incredibly important historical document; it almost perfectly marries the whitest of American music with indigenous Australian culture; it’s some of the finest country music you’ll hear all year.

Down-under civil-rights songs addressing feelings of racial alienation and making pleas for justice, all couched in the plainspoken language of vintage Nashville.

When it’s released in early February, this will become the most important country music release of 2013. Why?…This is country music wrought bruised and aching from the dustbowl that is Australia’s Outback.  This is Roger Knox bringing an Aboriginal voice to what amounts to Jimmie Rodgers, Lefty Frizzell, Woody Guthrie and Paul Robeson gathered at the billabong singing protest tunes. These are down-under songs of racial alienation, displacement, the march to civil rights and a collective voice in the wilderness proclaiming that they will not be moved. It is vintage Nashville sung like it should be; honestly, matter-of-fact and evocative as hell...

Most of these songs are upbeat, but the subject matter is anything but light. The lonesomeness of American country music is amplified tenfold by tales of the struggles of the Aborigine people and the bitter condemnations of white invasion…[There's] a longing for home that manifests itself in bursts of unexpected optimism. This yearning makes each song more poignant, and never cloyingly so.

Knox is something of a legend in his homeland and surrounded by the Chicago-based Pine Valley Cosmonauts, he runs through a dozen classics from the Aboriginal C&W cowboy songbook. It’s got pain ('Took the Children Away'), honky tonk dances ('Scobie’s Dream') and al points in between. Killer.

Stranger In My Land is a powerful collection full of pointed commentaries on the state of life for Australia’s Aborigines. Its true brilliance, however, is that these commentaries are presented in such an ear-pleasing manner, within songs that would be enjoyable no matter what their topic. And with a Shakespearean understanding for the timing of comic relief, there are moments of frivolity and nostalgia interspersed throughout, making it an even more entertaining experience. There’s no doubt that  Stranger In My Land is an important album, but it is also just a great listen that no fan of country music—no matter which hemisphere he or she calls home—should miss.

The best music is border music, the sound of cultures colliding. In the late 20th century Black Australians assimilated Country & Western, that whitest of American musical forms, to tell the story of their physical subjugation, spiritual stoicism and eventual political awakening.

Part travelogue, part National Geographic special, and part crash sociology course, Stranger in My Land is surely to be the most important album you will listen to all year, and might just be the most important album of the decade... a five on a five scale listen.