If you’ve never heard Bruce Cockburn, You’ve Never Seen Everything might well be the best place to start. Granted, it’s his latest… his 27^th album, in fact. But it synthesizes styles, sounds, sentiments, and the differing expressions of deep spirituality that Cockburn has exhibited over the years, compressing them into a bonfire of anger, insight, and energy.

There are songs of brilliance, songs of meditation, and experiments that reach varying degrees of success. It most resembles Cockburn’s masterpiece The Charity of Night in its ambition and poetry, making room for several spoken-word pieces. But instead of dwelling in the late night blues and dream-states of that record, it turns up the volume on the guitars and drums, making this his rowdiest and most temperamental record in decades.

A bit overproduced by Colin Linden and himself, the album might have been marred by having too many cooks in the kitchen. Everything layers on Cockburn’s guitars, the rhythms of Larry Taylor and Stephen Hodges (on leave from Tom Waits recordings), more than the usual mix of electronic enhancements, and an impressive list of backing vocalists (Sam Phillips, Sarah Harmer, Emmylou Harris, and Jackson Browne). While it makes for the biggest sound he’s ever cooked up, the listener has to work hard to appreciate the guitar work. The sound stage is just too crowded at times.

But there are plenty of surprises, and the highlights are strong and memorable. Cockburn’s lyrics still show an eye for detail and a flair for wordplay. And he shows maturity as well, offering a markedly different response to current events than the fiery zeal that ignited his younger anthems of protest. This time the emphasis is on the weight of sadness and the inability to stopt  he world's slide into greed, violence, and chaos.

Cockburn’s albums have always been travelogues. This volume is particularly interesting for its prophetic qualities and for the chronology of how the songs came into being.

Watch the dates. (They're listed in the album jacket.) The oldest songs contain the most convincing sense of wonder, awe, and joy at the grandeur of creation. Then, in the early months of 2001, tension, a sense of "dark tomorrows", as "the village idiot takes the throne." And finally, the event... September 11th and all that came with it, the violent backlash. It's no longer about "tomorrow." It's about how to live in the dark present.

In November 2001, he writes, "Put It In Your Heart," a song about steeling oneself for the hard days present and future.

As I stare into the flame
filled up with feelings I can't name
Images of life appear--
regret and anger, love and fear
Dark things drift across the screen
of mind behind whose veil are seen
love's ferocious eyes, and clear
the words come flying to my ear
"Go on - put it in your heart."
 

Terrible things done in the name
of tunnel vision and fear of change
surely are expressions of
a soul that's turned its back on love...

Clearly the escalation of violence, the war drums, they have awakened the dismay that we once heard in Cockburn's militant calls for protest against the trigger-happy leaders of the "free world."

But instead of calling for a rocket launcher, he has higher aims in mind, harder agendas.

The problem has not changed. Greed is still the monster provoking these terrors. On a dark, glimmering bed of embers, the pulsing guitars and thundering drums of “All Our Dark Tomorrows” offer one of Cockburn’s most apocalyptic visions.

Under the rain of all our dark tomorrows...

I can see in the dark

It’s where I used to live

I see excess and the gaping need

Follow the money

See where it leads

It’s to shrunken men

Stuffed up with greed…

Greed has him grinding his teeth on several tracks... especially “Trickle Down.” It’s a throwback to his jazzier 70s numbers, but the lyrics are just a rant against the economics of the American wealthy, against “the picture-phone aristocrats [that] lounge around the pool”, with an awkwardly alliterative rap. It does feature decent dueling guitar and keyboard solos, but one wishes he’d explored something new in this framework. Sometimes Cockburn’s social commentary is just to cumbersome to be musical, and this mediocre jazz just doesn’t suit the caustic nature of the lyric.

The album’s two opening tracks are stronger, optimistic and affirming. A funky bass line, a scorching guitar riff, and a groovy drum track punch out of the layered vocal ramble of “Tried and Tested”, in which Cockburn invites Sam Phillips to back him up. The song is basically an affirmation that he, the songwriter, is still standing—it’s the kind of thing that always feels to me like it’s toeing the line of self-indulgence. But the rest of the songs are the testimonies of a man wide awake and looking closely at his surroundings, so perhaps he’s earned the room for a bit of self-congratulation.

Similarly, “Open” stands as a banner song, one of those that steps back to make a more general statement about the work that has come before. “I’ve never lived with balance / Though I’ve always liked the notion,” he writes in his declaration of the desire to live “open”, ready for whatever curve balls the world pitches his way. “There’s an aching in my hip bone,” he says in a subtle reference to wrestling with angels. “There’s a clamoring of church bells.” I’m reminded of Peter Gabriel’s “In Your Eyes”, the idea that God’s light is glimmering through “a thousand churches”, but always drawing us through them, further up, further in.

“Everywhere Dance” is also about recognition of love and design amidst the chaos, and while the odd and slightly unsettling mix of piano and harmonica gives the album a tonal change-up, I’m impressed with the attempt to try something he hasn’t done before. In “Celestial Horses”, rumors of glory remind him of delight and awe. This song is better for turning our eyes heavenward than the album’s closing track, “Don’t Forget About Delight”, which sounds a bit trivial, like a weary obligation to be positive in retrospect.

In “Postcards from Cambodia”, he finds the album’s true center. Bowed down by the weight of dark visions, he finds himself in a different place than the angry young Cockburn who wanted to get hold of a rocket launcher and “make somebody pay.” Instead, he argues:

It’s too big for anger, it’s too big for blame
We stumble through history so humanly lame
So I bow down my head and say a prayer for us all
that we don’t fear the spirit when it comes to call…

Rather the react in rage, he reaches for a humble, meditative response of taming the best within.

The title track is a similarly long journey through a gallery of evil, a stroll through the inferno, a travel diary of pain and horror, culminating in a delicate reversal. Unfortunately, it is also another opinion-heavy rant, with statements like "my mind goes blank at the unbelievable indifference" and "There's a trade war brewing... but it's only more transnational manipulation...." Language like this sacrifices poetry for shock value. Still, the editorializing occurs against a mesmerizing backdrop, a vast cavernous chamber of echoes. And instead of leaving us without hope at the end of this torturous journey, he gives us a glimpse of distant light, reminding us that while we have not seen the end of evil, we have not exhausted the resources of redemption either.

It is only appropriate that the album's most inspiring refrain rephrases the question “How long oh Lord?” In the midst of these troubles, he turns loose a relentless riff of blues guitar and a gospel chorus:

Fold me into you
You know where I’m dying to be
When my ship sets sail on that ocean of deep mystery
I wanna wait no more!
I wanna wait no more!

After a close listen to this album, it is not hard to sympathize with that sentiment.

One might wish that Cockburn had distilled some of these weighty, ambitious, complex accounts of complaint into more concentrated expressions. He sounds a bit battle-scarred and beleaguered by the burden of his own political vigilance and spiritual insight. He may feel that backing himself up with a more complex sound will serve such weighty subjects. But the broad span of sound blunts some of the album’s impact. I miss the pointed voice of the man and his guitar. He does not need fancy production to make his observations hit home.

Bruce Cockburn is still essential, perhaps now more than ever, for being a witness to the world’s wounds. His stories are compelling, and his opinions are easy to applaud. Some folks just grab a hot topic and rant, but Cockburn has the voice of one who paid the price of going there and seeing for himself. Perhaps in the upcoming albums, his frustrations will find more poetic expressions. But for now, he seems to need the catharsis of some heavy-handed ranting. He delivers it here so passionately that it might have been dangerous to hold it in any longer.