I just found a review of Christopher Denny's Age Old Hunger (scroll down.) The reviewer's description of the strangely old-timey vibe on the record is spot-on and exactly what I was trying to get at last night. It's not that he sounds like he listens to a lot of old-time music. It's that he has that Patrick O'Brian quality of the being of the older time. Listening to the CD, I feel strange that it's not coming out of an ancient radio, or at the very least mono instead of stereo, on vinyl.

The point about the music and the quality of the vocal being more eloquent than the actual lyrics is also a point I'd endorse. He's one of those singers who could be singing in any language and I think I'd get it. And this excerpt says everything about his voice that you need to know:

[Denny's voice] sounds like it belongs to a sun-dried sharecropper in a WPA photograph, it is anachronistically vital, as though that sharecropper were young and hale and retouched in Technicolor. It has something of Jimmie Dale Gilmore's high-wire whine and Roy Orbison's throaty moan, but it is not exactly like either of those. It is sometimes like being licked and sometimes like being strangled. It is both smooth and peppery, wave and particle. It is impossible not to orient yourself to it, like a pole. He exerts over it a preternatural control: Here it is clenched and mournful, holed up in the center of his skull, here it is lean and elastic, here so thin the light shines through it. He makes it sound effortless, but there is heat coming off of it; his high notes are cauterizing.

I should probably not even try to add anything to that.

I will remark, though, that halfway through the album I began to fantasize about covers I'd like to hear him sing. "You Don't Know Me" is high on my list. Not that I plan to pester him on MySpace to do so.

It's probably lucky for Chris that he lives in Arkansas and not Halifax. Because I would surely come to all his shows until he was sick to death of the sight of me.