Chris Canterbury Dwells in the Darkness on Starkly Powerful ‘Quaalude Lullabies’ (ALBUM REVIEW)

Photo credit: Brooke Stevens

Nashville by way of Louisiana musician Chris Canterbury can’t be accused of false advertising with his latest, Quaalude Lullabies. Across nine tracks, Canterbury lays out songs of depression, loneliness and addiction with remarkable honesty. The template is set early with the opening track, “The Devil, The Dealer & The Dark Side Mastered,” with little more than an acoustic guitar and Canterbury’s deep, starkly emotive vocals.

The nine-track record comes five years after his last album and it’s beautiful not only in the poetic despair of the lyrics but in his scaled back delivery as well, coming across like Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska or Willie Nelson’s Red Headed Stranger. “When I sat down to write this project, I tried to present each topic as a straight-forward Saturday morning kitchen conversation. That’s how I approach songwriting,” he said recently, begging the question just how dark are those morning breakfast conversations?

Canterbury produced the record himself and though it sounds professional and clean, it does give off the feel of a listening to bedroom demos in part due to the seemingly confessional nature of the lyrics. The album closer “Back On The Pills,” about being in a cheap motel room with the narrator thinking of the ways he’s destroyed his life, boasts some of the album’s most powerful lines, like “I found Jesus in the nightstand”; And “the thought of being sober is the worst part of coming down.”

Alongside the eight originals here is a cover of Will Kimbrough’s “Yellow Mama,” about the last moments before dying in an Alabama electric chair, a topic that is given a little bit of light thanks to the almost breezy waltz arrangement of the song. The darkness and loneliness that define the record is also what makes it so appealing and one that’s destined to get played again and again. Born In the USA may be Springsteen’s biggest selling album, but most music fans will tell you, Nebraska is his best. 

  

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