Steve Earle: The Revolution Starts Now

By GRAHAM REID

(Herald rating: * * * )

Earle won few friends here for concerts which were thrash-rock and his voice little more than a monochrome growl. You can imagine some of the songs on this urgent collection would sound much the same live, which isn't to say that these tracks are all broadcast on the same narrow frequency: Earle adds necessary studio polish (multi-tracked vocals, a string section stabbing through The Gringo's Tale), and he maintains that affection for Rubber Soul-period Beatles alongside country rock. He even allows himself a little humour on the (pretty bad) reggae riffing about Condoleezza Rice on Condi, Condi.

The war in Iraq is rightly still his concern and Earle addresses the issue from the bottom up.

Home to Houston is about a guy who drove big wheel rigs but is now doing the same in Basra because there was nothing for him at home; Rich Man's War looks at young men on both sides of the conflict who are fighting and dying for men far from the front; Warrior is a spoken-word piece which reaches towards the mythic and has a Doors-like resonance. It should be accompanied by Coppolla's choppers coming over the horizon and napalm explosions. He turns in a grunge version of Tex-Mex music on F the CC (an expletive-inclusive swipe at US talkback radio), Emmylou Harris joins him for the backbeat ballad Comin' Around, and the highlight is I Thought You Should Know in which the much-married Earle explores the territory between lust and love but knows where heartbreak lies.

Earle has said he can't wait for this war to be over so he can get back to singing about girls and stuff, and there are a few places here where you might feel the same. Especially when he brings that hard-won maturity about such things to a song like I Thought You Should Know. But while the war drags on, his Everyman voice demands to be heard and is rarely less than commanding and utterly passionate.

Label: Elite