Ely’s fellow Flatlander also has a new album, a classic protest album that opens with the a cappella “Give Them Water.” The track has a hymn vibe and drops such moral bombs as, “If you send someone to kill someone / or to be killed to stop the killing / you are also killing.” All the album’s themes can be found in the song, but they’re fleshed out lyrically and musically over the course of the rest of the album. The truths remain equally pointed—“The worst is not the body count nor battles lost and won / it’s in the hearts of those who fail to feel the real damage done”—but they’re couched in more easily palatable songs, ones that twang musically and vocally like a central Texas Dylan.

 

Almost as audacious as “Give Them Water” is the album closer, “Great Election Day.” It, too, borrows from the structure and vocabulary of southern spirituals. It’s tempting to hear “election day” as a phrase substituting for the day of going to Glory, crossing the River or a similar metaphor for meeting the Heavenly Father. Instead, though, Hancock is really singing about election day 2008 as if it’s Judgment Day. It’s smart, passionate and slyly funny, musically brought to life by a slide guitar that bristles to life mid-line to energize the proceedings. In Hancock’s hands, the protest song isn’t just smart and righteous; it’s artful, fun and as rich as any good art.