John Mellencamp: Sad Clowns & Hillbillies review – heartening but uneven Americana

Occupying the space where Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, Tom Petty and Billy Joel converge, over the decades John Mellencamp has honed a sort of everyman Americana, representing a more heartening type of populism. Sad Clowns & Hillbillies, his 23rd album and a collaboration of sorts with Carlene Carter (daughter of June), continues this tradition in part – most obviously with Easy Target, a rather elliptical meditation on the lie of post-racism that owes a significant debt to Desire-era Dylan. Carter and Mellencamp have worked together before, including on his score for Meg Ryan’s second world war drama Ithaca, and offcuts from that project (including the suitably saccharine Sugar Hill Mountain) surface here, as do some from Ghost Brothers of Darkland County, the musical he made with Stephen King. It makes for an album that is not particularly consistent in sound or even sentiment – the worthiness of Easy Target is matched with half-of-the-title track Sad Clowns, a patronising and crankily retro missive on chivalry.