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 Caught in the Carousel "There will be music despite everything"
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Adam Arcuragi
I Am Become Joy
High Two
Like John Prine, Bob Dylan and Woody Guthrie before him, Adam Arcuragi is a great narrator of Big American Trouble. With a rippling delivery that sounds not unlike X's John Doe or a gruffer Richard Buckner, Arcuragi's voice rings with the same kind of lyrical Heartland omniscience that made his aforementioned musical ancestors transform from being guys with guitars to the great poets of song. The Philadelphia singer/songwriter's second album, I Am Become Joy is a wobbly blast of American soul, scruffy roots rock and deftly played indie folk. Accompanied by The Lupine Choral Society, a ragtag confederacy of musicians whose members change from week to week, Arcuragi presides over these eleven numbers like a wrecked-hearted conductor with a penchant for gospel, heavy drinking and tragedy. "She Comes To Me" is a rousing opener rife with an orchard of waking horns; "Math" is powered by somnolent handclaps and executed with a drowsy precision that gives way to a beautifully accelerating chorus, while the perfectly laconic "We Steal People's Medicine" starts with a cough and ends with Arcuragi cryptically claiming he's, "...ready for what you're talking about." Later, the acoustic "Her Festival Song" and the gospel-flavored "Lunch In Field Four" are particularly winning, while "The Guns That Bring The Morning Home" finds Arcuragi defiantly declaring, "...if it means my life, I'll still sing out about the light." Capable of lyrical impressionism ("The shape of the road in your thigh" or "You glide like a pedal guitar") this is an artist who—because he's "in love with something invisible"—is willing to push language into abstraction in order to come up with the closest approximation of the inexplicable. And he nails it every time. Riveting work.
—Alex Green
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