Following a stint fronting a thrash metal outfit, Texas-born Jinks, as heavily tattooed as he is heavily bearded, found his way back to the music upon which he was raised, the outlaw country of Jennings, Cash and Haggard. No surprise then to find I’m Not The Devil, his fourth album, is steeped in classic hardcore mainstream country (as opposed to mainstream Nashville), replete with fiddles, pedal steel and vocal twang.
It opens as it means to continue with ‘The Same’, steel chiming out and his rich baritone conjuring barrooms where men come to drink away their sorrows as he sings about catching up with an old flame whose feelings have moved on while his haven’t. There’s regret too in the slow walking title track, veined with the need for forgiveness (“I’m not the devil you think that I am. It ain’t no excuse, but I’m just a man. I slipped and I fell and got out of hand, but I’m not the devil you think that I am”) and that struggle between past mistakes and trying to move on informs much of the album, the Cash-like chugging ‘No Guarantees’ offering up religious references to remind that it takes more than just reading the Bible to overcome life’s temptations and struggles and that it’s “gonna be hard before it gets easy.”
There’s a couple of covers, the most familiar being the slow-paced Merle Haggard hit ‘The Way I Am’, the other coming from the pen of Billy Don Burns in the form of the slow waltzing, steel-streaked ‘Gaylor Creek Church’. Otherwise, everything here is a Jinks original.
On the one hand there’s the uptempo and lyrically upbeat spousal love song ‘She’s All Mine’ and the piano pumping, trucking rock n roll stomper ‘Chase That Song’. But, it’s the slower reflective and introspective numbers that dominate, notably the lost and broken dreams littering ‘Vampires’, the confessional self-examination and need for a hood woman’s salvation in ‘No Words’, the spiritual and emotional exhaustion of ‘Heavy Load’ (complete with a spoken quotation about the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse from The Book Of Revelations) and the five-minute ‘Give All You Can’ about trying to escape the darkness that leads him astray and find the redemption of the light. By way of musical contrast to everything that precedes it, the album ends in swampy, blues territory more redolent of a pissed off Steve Earle (or perhaps the adolescent influence of Metallica’s James Hetfield) than his honky tonk heroes, percussive snaps and throaty guitar growls driving ‘Hand Me Down’, the album’s sole excursion into political comment as he enumerates the things that, now a father of two kids, get him angry about the legacy they will inherit, from politicians and Wall Street financiers to the “false laws of man” and “your latest brand”. “It might take some time, but I’ll show you that I’m worth the wait”, he sings. He is.
Mike Davies
Artist’s website: www.codyjinks.com
I’m Not The Devil’ – live and acoustic:
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