The music on "No Better Than This", Mellencamp 25th album, is in general more stuck in 1928 than 2010. Everything is recorded in one take on an old Ampex recorder. The musicians crowded around a tiny microphone. This is more than lo-fi. It is mono. The atmosphere and the small-room feeling can often only be found in old archives and vinyls. It feels like the songs step out of your stereo, sits down in the next room and begins to play upright bass.
Reminiscent of Bob Dylan's "Love & Theft", Johnny Cash's earliest recordings for Sun Records, the Dust Bowl-country, rockabilly and field recordings of hillbilly waltzes, blues and killer ballads. And guitarist Mark Ribot's always an an equally spooky vibrato on the strings that when he visited the Robert Plant and Alison Krauss on the album "Raising Sand". It has not been easy to like John Mellencamp. The last 20 years is an endless series of small and large disappointments and an increasingly blunt songwriting. But this is desert trek. Here he rises up with a passion and inspiration that he did not show up late 1987.
And the old voices and spirits fit Mellencamp's voice perfectly. It is here, in music that seems to be written 70 years ago and do not give a damn about commercial radio and Web TV, he belongs. The stories of poor and exhausted people we recognize. But the rest can not be compared to something that a 58-year-old from Indiana released. It is not the best he has done. But it is definitely the best he has released since "The Lonesome Jubilee". Parts of "No Better Than This" was recorded in a hotel room in San Antonio, Texas, where Robert Johnson once lived.
John Mellencamp rigged up the apparatus in exactly the same corner of the room as the black blues man was standing when he recorded "Hell Hound's on my trail".