Warren Zevon: Life'll Kill Ya : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

Among the many quotable lines on this morbidly engrossing disc from Warren Zevon is this opening zinger from "Hostage-O": "I can see me bound and gagged/Dragged behind the clownmobile." These lines are delivered straight-faced to fingerpicked acoustic accompaniment, either making the joke even funnier or leaving you wondering whether it's a joke at all. So it goes on Life'll Kill Ya, an album that seesaws between gallows humor and hopeful yearning, with the balance tilting toward the former. Throughout it all, Zevon maintains his poise as a musician who came of age on the mid-Seventies California singer-songwriter scene - just check out his well-tempered piano playing on the grimly ironic title track or the brisk, Dylanesque guitar-and-harmonica romp "Dirty Little Religion" - while making like the bandleader on the Titanic with an iceberg in full view. He forthrightly and unsentimentally skewers Elvis Presley in "Porcelain Monkey" ("Left behind by the latest trends/Eating fried chicken with his regicidal friends"), then turns the tables on himself in "For My Next Trick I'll Need a Volunteer." A contemporary blues prosaically titled "My Shit's Fucked Up" and the sardonic, faux-gospel "Fistful of Rain" represent a fatalistic bottoming-out, but Zevon exits on a high note with the utterly guileless and prayerful "Ourselves to Know" and "Don't Let Us Get Sick." Moral of the story: While it's true that life'll kill ya, don't give up without a fight.