| As the title suggests, this is the third of the albums that Cash has recorded since his career was resuscitated in 1993 by a fortuitous coming together with Def American founder Rick Rubin. Though Rubin was principally famous as a hip-hop producer, he brought out the best in Cash, having the sense to strip the recordings back to the bare minimum needed to support Cash's peerless voice. The first two records they made together, American Recordings and Unchained were two of the best albums of Cash's long and incalculably influential career, and Solitary Man is better than either. The album is about evenly split between Cash originals and covers of traditional songs that have influenced him, and newer material clearly written under his influence. His own songs embrace both the unabashed spiritualism of his under-regarded gospel recordings ("Field Of Diamonds", "Before My Time") and his eternal fascination with the rural America he was born into ("Country Trash"), and they are just great. The real gems, however, are the covers. Though Cash could now bring a baleful, Old Testament portent to "I Should Be So Lucky", his knelling baritone finds a hundred new shades of black in Neil Diamond's "Solitary Man", Nick Cave's "The Mercy Seat" and, most surprisingly but most effectively, U2's "One". --Andrew Mueller |
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