![]() “But I didn’t have enough stuff for them to sink their teeth into.” Finally, last March Timms was in London on tour with the Mekons when she ran into offbeat Americana singer Johnny Dowd, a southern-bred trucking-company owner who put out his first record just shy of age 50. Timms made a couple of brief efforts at recording the disc with post-rock engineer Casey Rice and Tortoise’s Johnny Herndon, “people who were programming things and cutting things up in a way that I thought would be interesting,” she says. “But I never felt this great urgency to get done until a year ago, at which point I finally had six or seven songs that could form the basis for this album I’d been thinking of.” The Mekons kept busy, and she made guest appearances on other people’s albums. “I got halfway through making them and I thought, ‘This isn’t really me, it’s not what I want to do right now,'” she says. Over the next couple years Timms started and then abandoned work on two more country-themed albums for Bloodshot. I’m not ashamed of it–but I never listen to it.” “I thought it was a little throwaway thing. “I was surprised how well the record did,” Timms says. Recorded in three days and released by Bloodshot, Twilight Laments featured a set of quaint country covers. “And then it just seemed easier to do something else,” she says. She began working on an embryonic version of the record with Langford at his home studio in 1998, but the sessions stalled as Timms, who rarely writes her own material, struggled to find suitable songs. ![]() And I wanted to make a record like that, an oddball folk record,” she says. “I’ve always liked the idea of having these low-grade electronic toys mixing in with other stuff. Cuts like “Bomb,” by her longtime band the Mekons, and Jon Langford’s “Sentimental Marching Song” appeared in her solo sets in the mid-90s, and during these shows she’d often accompany herself using an old Yamaha QY10 sequencer. In the World of Him began taking shape when Timms was nearly ten years younger, well before the 1999 release of her last solo record, Cowboy Sally’s Twilight Laments for Lost Buckaroos. “There’s no way I wanted to put my entire body in its current state on an album cover,” the 44-year-old Brit says wryly. When it came time for Timms to design the cover for her new album, In the World of Him (Touch and Go)–a suite of songs largely written by men about women–she persuaded Sultan himself to restage the shot with her as the subject. Something about the expression on her face, neither defiant nor despairing, resonated with Sally Timms. The centerpiece of the collection is a stark portrait of porn star Sharon Wild: wearing stilettos and a bra and panties, she perches at the end of a stripped bed with a mussed throw, cradling herself and staring into the distance. Larry Sultan’s much praised photo series “The Valley” captures actors in between takes at X-rated-film shoots. Now Playing: Chicago’s history in movie ads.Timms sings those lines with agonizing yet dignified vulnerability - In the World of Him is a short but harrowing and absorbing journey into Sally’s very own Heart of Darkness, her Apocalypse Now ‘n’ Then. ![]() Here, sex and war are analogous ( Latex icons line the shelves/Like toy soldiers in a sex army, from Johnny Dowd’s “139 Hernalser Gürtel”), and people are afraid of expressing love ( It’s not that I don’t want to marry you/Because marrying would mean that I’d have to chain you not choose you, from Kevin Coyne’s “I’m Just a Man”). Timms’ imperturbable alto - incredibly expressive without a hint of histrionics or aloofness - glides serenely over sustained keyboard textures, dissonant guitars, disembodied beats, and distant percussion, sounding like an omniscient Greek chorus observing and recording the horrors of human drama across eternity. Less an album than a song cycle or suite, World of Him comprises songs composed by men concerning disconnection, loss, and conflict, sung from their perspective in a setting of cool, literate, fractured elegance. While previously Timms has strongly leaned toward country music, Him finds her sneaking into the gloomy terrains of Leonard Cohen and Nico. Sally Timms, a member of the world’s greatest English-singing rock ‘n’ roll band (the Mekons), has several solo albums to her credit (someone please reissue her first, Somebody’s Rocking My Dreamboat), but In the World of Him is a significant departure.
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