Album of the week: Orville Peck – 'Mule'

Orville Peck is a baritone-voiced country music artist. Pseudonymous and with his face permanently concealed by fringes or tassels or Lone Ranger-style eye coverings, his identity is still largely mysterious, despite the telling details offered by hench arms that are fully and ornately tatted. But he’s known to be South Africa-born, Canada-raised, Los Angeles-resident, mixed-race and queer.

Last year he did a long run as the MC in the Broadway production of Cabaret. He’s in the upcoming new film adaptation of computer game Street Fighter, playing Vega – a “masked claw fighter from Spain,” it sez here (“here” being Wikipedia), “who uses a personal fighting style combining Japanese ninjutsu and Spanish bullfighting, earning him the nickname of "Spanish Ninja”.

Peck is, then, to say the least, a very new kind of country artist. But he’s no man in the irony mask. His take on the genre is deeply felt, musically sincere and, in the quality of his writing, wholly authentic. As much is toweringly apparent on Mule.

Rich and resonant, beaten and bruised, his fourth album is even true to the pill-poppin’, bottle-got-me-down-again tropes of country – which, on top of that oaky voice, casts him as a millennial Johnny Cash. That’s how strong his writing and singing are, and that’s how brutal his life experiences have been.

Mule is a song-cycle account of Peck, after splitting from his partner, descending into addiction, overdose and near-death. Of his self-inflicted morphing into someone, or something, he doesn’t recognise. It opens with ‘Prologue (Eulogy of a Man Turned Mule)’, a beautiful, 74-second close-harmony hymn sung by Emmylou Harris, Noah Cyrus and Allison Russell. The video shows them standing sentinel, three black-veiled sisters of mercy, as a zonked-out Peck lies in a desolate shack.

Then it’s into ‘Big Ol’ House’ and ‘Already Gone’, sturdy country-rock songs of isolation and desperation, anthems that are very much singalong rather than, well, moan-along. Because even when he’s in his cups, Peck’s songwriting soars with captivating imagery and earworm melodies.

As he sings on the finger-snapping ‘Rehab Blues’: “I hate it here, I don’t care and I wanna die…” He goes on, over the raucous sounds of a buzzy bar and honky-tonk piano, painting a picture of black despair and even blacker humour: “Get a spoon, dig a hole, buy a bottle and a ball, and get the gang back on the road… So catch me on the evening news, ‘dumb fag dies from the rehab blues’”.

But heading towards of the heart of the album, on ‘Ring the Bell’ – a defiant, celebratory, woozy yarn of late nights and sexual recklessness – Peck is seeing, if not the light at the end of the tunnel, then at least a widening of the tunnel. He might be sprawled on the bathroom floor, but at least he’s reaching for the sink.

Orville Peck - Run Out Of Road (Official Visualizer) - YouTube

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That said: no one ever said recovery was linear or easy. By the next song, the crashing, tumultuous blues of ‘Blue Skies’, his anguished yodel working at full pelt, Peck is back in the ditch, staring up at oblivion. A couple of songs later, on pedal-steel boot-scooter ‘Cowboy Heart’, he’s upright at least, strolling Hollywood Boulevard, “nothing on my brain, just old cocaine”.

And on he rollercoasters, heading to the power-pop, syncopated beat of ‘Too Little, Too Late’, co-written with Dan Wilson, the one-time Semisonic man who co-wrote Adele’s ‘Someone Like You’. But for all Peck’s sobriety now IRL, on Mule there is, ultimately, no wholly happy ending for this man caught between the perils and prizes of stardom. As he recently explained, his album is titled after the pack animal that is half horse, half donkey.

On the closing title track, a fiddle-and-mandolin bluegrass ballad, Peck promises that “baby, I’m comin’ home”. Thirteen songs in, he's not there yet. But Mule proves that, in terms of this brilliant, bracing, bold blast of artistry, it's very much not the destination but the journey.