If to live is to fly, as Townes Van Zandt would warble, then he himself, to quote from his devout admirer Willie Nelson, was an angel flying too close to the ground. His quavering voice flattened with alcoholic pickling, the burdensome weight of bodily pain palpable in his throat, Van Zandt's powerful songs resonated through artists such as Emmylou Harris, Steve Earle, the Cowboy Junkies, and Tindersticks over the decades with a decidedly dark edge to the proceedings. While often compared to Bob Dylan in terms of songwriting prowess, Van Zandt's words relied less on stream-of-conscious glossolalia than on the barren wastelands inside his own head. The result is more Samuel Beckett than Lightnin' Hopkins, and lines like, "I got a friend at last.../ His name's Codeine/ He's the nicest thing I've ever seen/ Together we're gonna wait around and die," convey a trailer-park existentialism that can make for a rough listen-- one preferably with the windows shut and the whiskey opened, the gas on and the lights off.

The last in a series of fervent exhuming by the German label Normal, this posthumous release couples a 1994 solo performance in Ireland with five songs recorded days before Townes' death on New Year's Day, 1997. Opener "Flying Shoes" is of the trunk-packing blues variety, although there's a greater weariness on display here than in earlier versions, leaving one to wonder if Townes could have even put his boots on by this point. A tape buzzing distracts the fidelity of the bleak "Kathleen", but the downward spiral of emotions comes through painfully clear, and throughout the concert, his playing is still lucid. The audience is rapt and appreciative throughout, if not dropping like flies as the concert continues.

When it comes to women in Townes Van Zandt's songs, they are of one variety only: succubi posing as barflies, pulling him down deeper into the burning hellfires with each drink of bourbon. In "Two Girls", they're of a Lynchian dichotomy, one light and one dark, abstracted beyond mere gal-flesh. The wicked witch tale, "The Hole", is harrowing, despite its obvious imagery; Van Zandt's voice is a haunting amalgam of Hank Williams' "Luke the Drifter" persona preaching the allegorical estrangements of Franz Kafka. "Don't go sneaking 'round no holes," he croaks at the concluding moral, "there just might be something down there, wants to gobble up your soul."

It's not all doom and gloom though, as Townes was known for interjecting jokes during his shows, if only to keep the suicide rate down. Some appear here, as does a funny talking blues about discovering the pocket-change pleasures of Thunderbird wine and its cloudy-brained oblivion. With Van Zandt's well-documented history of alcoholism, though, it seems to laugh to keep from crying.

The last studio recordings are not culled from the aborted sessions with Sonic Youth drummer Steve Shelley and Two Dollar Guitar-ist Tim Foljahn, but from earlier in that fateful December. Aside from a Pogues cover ("Dirty Old Town"), these are slower, eerier versions of old material, almost from life's other side, and are difficult to stomach with foretold death so palpable in the air. "Nothing" was harrowing enough on his 1971's Delta Momma Blues, but here he merges with the death rattle itself, barely exhaling the final lines: "Sorrow and solitude, these are the precious things, and the only words that are worth remembering." Absolutely Nothing is fascinating, albeit extremely dismal listening, but, sharing seven songs with the classic double live album Live at the Old Quarter, Houston, Texas, is ultimately more for completists and those searching for an aural equivalent of Faces of Death.

-Andy Beta, February 6th, 2003