Already Uncut-endorsed via two fine LPs as head of wistful country types Horse Stories, Burke's solo debut finds him in intimate, hushed repose. His acoustic guitar fingering is highly expressive, be it woven into delicate sound webs on the love-torn "Cigarettes", delving into the country-blues of "Long Face" or lighting up "Which Train's She On?" with flashes of slide. Burke's voice remains his crowning glory, though, wringing nuance from the simplest of melodies.
The Vietnam war had been over for three years by the time Hal Ashby made Coming Home in 1978. Those who'd survived the combat zones of South-East Asia had returned to find themselves shunned and quarantined, like lepers in their home towns; a living, breathing reminder of a shameful war many back home would rather forget had ever happened. Some of those who came back perhaps wished they'd died out there in the jungles—the paraplegics, the traumatised, forever dreading the nameless, shapeless things that whispered to them in the night.
