Daniel Knox

Evryman for Himself
4/5
If Daniel Knox wasn’t a Tin Pan Alley revisionist with a macabre sense of humour and a ripely ruminative croon, he’d make an excellent criminal psychologist. The second part of the piano-playing Chicagoan’s ‘Disaster’ trilogy gets remastered and a proper label release here in time for his support dates with the Handsome Family. And it’s a cautionary, corpse-festooned, aphorism-rich chronicle against love, hope, trust and debt collectors, in which drunken pianos waltz with crippled horns and melodies soar in direct disproportion to his characters’ levels of disillusionment and dysfunction. Sordid and sublime.