American V: A Hundred Highways
- Johnny Cash
- Band Name: Johnny Cash
- Record Label: Lost Highway
- Release Date: Jul 4, 2006
- Critic Score
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100As with his last couple of releases in the American series, his voice no longer commands attention with booming authority, but there's something about that gasping frailty that makes this proud final bow even more endearing.
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Virtually every song sounds like a leave-taking, though the overall mood is reflective and restrained, in places almost easy-going.
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100It could be the soundtrack to death, love, pain, strength, joy, suffering, courage, despair, and faith all at the same time.
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93A hefty team was assembled to do this right... and do it right they do. [#21, p.93]
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If this is, as Rubin has said, ''Johnny's final statement''... then it is a fitting one, completely representative of the faithful old man he had become, having long ago shed his outlaw image no matter how often others tried to resaddle him with it.
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Thank you very much, Mr Rubin--The Man In Black is still with us. [1 Jul 2006, p.36]
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From beginning to end, it's as heartwarming and heartbreaking an album as you're likely to hear this year. [Aug 2006, p.86]
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A fitting eulogy.
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80Unsurprisingly, American V is the most desolate of the series, bereft of the moments of playfulness that leavened its predecessors. [Aug 2006, p.92]
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Listening to this album, one can't get around the knowledge that it is a posthumous collection made in Cash's last days, but even without that context, it would have much the same impact.
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80It makes a dignified final addition to the American Recordings series. [Aug 2006, p.109]
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It's a hard record to bear, but it's a deep one.
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80Though his delivery veers between strength and frailty, he's in full control. [Aug 2006, p.83]
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80V... is actually less tearjerking and portentous than IV.
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80It is put together with a huge degree of dignity and respect that makes it the perfect swansong for the Man In Black.
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78It's a satisfying and often moving final chapter to Cash's life and career, one that rejects self-pity and remorse in favor of hopefulness and even celebration.
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You never heard a sadder album than American V.
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It's a pleasant collection, comfortably consolidated and comfortably nice, despite the lack of anything earth-shattering.
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If the force-of-nature power of his prime is often missing, in its place is an undeniable resolve and faith in his mission. [25 Jun 2006]
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70This is not a 'commercial' release, at least not in the commonly construed meaning of the word. If you had to be picky, you could say that nothing has the impact of that cover of Nine Inch Nail's "Hurt" or Nick Lowe's "The Beast In Me". But that's beside the point.
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70The dignity and sharp poetic instincts on American V are all classic Cash. [Aug 2006, p.89]
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70Some selections are heartwrenching... But others bear the stain of sentimentality, denial, even exploitation. [Jul 2006, p.98]
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No one expects an album full of songs about death to be fun, but overall this set feels more ponderous than it should.
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70Perhaps the most intimate of an intimate series.
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70The songs have a measured, elegiac intensity, the sound of musicians choosing their notes carefully and making just the right choices.
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The music isn't afraid to call for tears, but it does so through understatement. Cash's voice is always exposed, whether it's full-toned or faltering, and most of the tracks are folky and reverent, placing measured finger-picking above churchy chords.
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70If A Hundred Highways had kicked off Cash's American resurgence, it might have been greeted as a minor release, a nice offering by an artist who was in his sunset years.
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67This set of songs comes with a chill of morbidity that's hard to shake.
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Highways is a far cry from what made this now deceased legend eternal. [#14]
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Positive: 15 out of 15
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Mixed: 0 out of 15
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