Snowed In

Snowed In was recorded during the last year of Tim Rose's life, and the process was, in producer Colin Winston-Fletcher's words, "like trying to tame a lion with a rubber chair." The end result is a short album that is dark, depressing, haunting, atmospheric, ominous, and raw as a bare nerve. Everything moves at a slow (and somehow desperate) pace, with Winston-Fletcher's frequent orchestrations giving the whole sequence a kind of ponderous claustrophobia, and the overall tone here is one of enforced defeat and regret. Rose is perhaps most famous for his arrangements of two traditional-sounding tunes, "Hey Joe" and "Morning Dew," and arguably the two best songs on this offering are again drawn from folk pieces, "Down in the Valley" (which contains the telling line "roses love sunshine") and "Hanging Tree," both of which are bone-chillingly bleak in tone. Nothing here is going to cheer anybody up (unless you're Nick Cave or Leonard Cohen), and while this certainly is not an easy album to listen to, it also paints a portrait of an artist unwilling to make any last concessions. If taming Rose for these sessions was difficult, well, you get what you get, because this album sounds like it comes from the heart of a caged lion.