Bruce Cockburn

Item: You've Never Seen Everything
Author: Andrew West Griffin

You've Never Seen Everything

(2003)

Reviewed by Andrew West Griffin

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Label Rounder RecordsThe Phantom Tollbooth2003

folk rock roots rock singer-songwriter

Four years since the release of his underrated Breakfast in New Orleans, Dinner in Timbuktu album, we find Canadian singer-songwriter Bruce Cockburn ready to tackle the very real issues facing humanity on his latest Rounder Records release, You've Never Seen Everything. Cockburn is not afraid to "speak truth to power," as the tired old bumper sticker says. I found this out back in the 1980's while listening to his overtly political songs that addressed U.S. intervention in Central America, human rights abuses in the Third World and environmental degradation across the globe.

On the twelve-song You've Never Seen Everything Cockburn is in top form. He seems re-energized. I'd have to say this is his strongest album since his classic 1988 release Big Circumstance.

On the opening track, "Tried and Tested," drummers Gary Craig and Ben Riley keep a hypnotic rhythm as Cockburn's vocal cadence addresses how human greed prevents the world's problems from being solved. With its bright violin, courtesy of Hugh Marsh and some lovely backing vocals from singer Sarah Harmer, Cockburn sings and plays guitar on "Open" with a real vibrancy.

Don't let the mysterious sounds of rain forest amphibians opening up "All Our Dark Tomorrows" fool you. They're a warning of what lies ahead in the dark places of the human heart. Very Conrad-esque. On this cryptic track, Cockburn sings of "shrunken men stuffed up with greed," conspiring how to make more money and generate more misery for the world's people. And the hits just keep on coming. On the jazzy "Trickle Down," Cockburn points fingers at the merchants of crass commercialism, the soul-less war profiteers and faceless mega-corporations.

"What used to pass for education now look more like ignoration / Take the people's money and slip it to the corporation / Yellow rain golden shower, pesticide firepower / Summon feudal demons of sweatshop subjugation." Powerful.

The horrific images on 9/11 are addressed on "Put It In Your Heart," as is the religious fundamentalism --" the tunnel vision and fear of change" -- that was behind the attacks. This one stays on the brain hours and days after hearing it.

The legacy of brutal, murderous Cambodian dictator Pol Pot and his "killing fields" are featured in "Postcards from Cambodia," a poetic and largely spoken word piece where he says,

"This is too big for anger / It's too big for blame / We stumble through history so humanly lame."

One surprise song is "Celestial Horses," a song he wrote back in 1978 that is very John Denver-esque in nature. Jackson Browne provides harmony vocals on this mellow song about finding a semblance of peace amidst the grandeur of the Rocky Mountains.

And then the listener snaps back to reality with the menacing spoken word title track, which comes across like dark snapshots taken by David Lynch with its "bad magic and gangrene politics."

Cockburn, it's safe to say, is a Christian in the true sense of the word. He is speaking up for those who have no voice. He has true compassion and is unafraid to show his listeners that the emperor has no clothes and that the empire is not infallible. Cockburn knows we can do better.

You've got to give him props for speaking the truth and sharing it with us in such an articulate fashion.

5 tocks