Alive & killing

by David Cantwell

ROBBIE FULKS
Let’s Kill Saturday Night
Geffen

As soon as you hear the crunchy power chords of this album’s opening title track, you know Saturday night isn’t the only thing Robbie Fulks wants to kill. Like Wilco on Being There, Fulks wants to off our expectations too. So Let’s Kill Saturday Night, Fulks’ major-label debut and his best album to date, rarely sounds like the traditional country music we’ve come to associate with him.

Unexpectedly, the initial effect of this new sonic approach is to detract attention from what Fulks is best known for: his lyrics. With his voice regularly surrounded here by twisted or jangling electric guitars and thundering drums, Fulks’ words aren’t as unavoidable, and don’t invite such close inspection, as they did on his earlier Bloodshot Records releases.

That’s interesting because, while Fulks is an unerring composer of catchy melodies and a frequently brilliant lyricist, one of his primary weaknesses in the past has been the inconsistency of his words. On last year’s South Mouth, for each pair of haunting story songs such as "Cold Statesville Ground" and "South Richmond Girl", there was a moment of pure drivel like "Dirty-Mouthed Flo". And standing shoulder-to-shoulder with undeniable instances of heartwrenching beauty – the painfully gripping "I Was Just Leaving" or the Nashville Sound-ing "Forgotten But Not Gone", both of which sounded like instant classics – you could find an insipid throwaway such as "Goodbye Good-Lookin’", which was exactly the sort of dime-a-dozen, "dumb-ass song" Fulks disses in his anti-Nashville diatribe, "Fuck This Town", an infuriating, perplexing composition in its own right. Were we supposed to cheer that song’s offhand slams against feminism and gays, or were we supposed to see these bigotries as evidence that the song’s narrator – who’s only pissed because his own publishing deal has been unfruitful – is not to be trusted any further than he could be thrown?

Apparently, Fulks’ live performances can sometimes be untrustworthy as well. The one time I saw him, he played emotional chicken with himself, and lost. After delivering one sad and gorgeous ballad, he proceeded to immediately yank the rug from under it by making a big "I don’t mean it" show of wiping away crocodile tears – a gesture that only served to remind that Fulks has occasionally been plagued by irony (his Trailer Trash Review) and emotional distance ("She Took A Lot Of Pills") throughout his career.

On his new album, though, these problems are solved, mainly. Let’s Kill Sataurday Night features Fulks’ most consistent writing, and a few of his finest compositions yet. But it’s the sound that immediately overwhelms. The title track could’ve been a country song – it begins with Fulks declaring "Every dollar I make is a buck I owe" – but with electric guitars screaming all around him, the song becomes a particularly desperate rock anthem of weekend escape; it’s Rockpile on speed. Later, on the sweet but distorted "Caroline" (the best Matthew Sweet song that Matthew Sweet never wrote) and the bubblegummy "She Must Think I Like Poetry" (pure power-pop along the lines of the Odds and Adam Schmitt), Fulks creates pop-based rock ’n’ roll that’s nothing short of exhilarating.

There’s a couple of more solid pop-rockers here ("Take Me To The Paradise" and "Down In Her Arms"), but this isn’t only a pop-rock release. "Bethelridge" is an atmospheric tape-loop track that owes as much to a monk’s chant as it does to Irish keens or hill-country ballads, and the catchy chorus of "Little King" is backed by a blistering guitar attack that verges on Southern rock.

And, buried near the end, there’s even some country numbers. "Can’t Win For Losing You", for example, rides the stinging pedal steel of Nashville legend John Hughey and is one of Fulks’ finest twang performances to date. Less successful is "God Isn’t Real", a Louvins-inspired cut that sounds high and lonesome all right, but leaves you wondering, once again, what to make of its narrator. Is a line like "Go ask a child with cancer who eases her pain" supposed to be a sophisticated argument, or is it intended to be taken as the junior-high level theology it really is? I distrust it.

On two more cuts, though, there’s no mistaking that Fulks is at the top of his game. Soulful and organ-filled and sensuous as all hell, "Pretty Little Poison", a duet with Lucinda Williams, serves as a remarkable companion piece to Williams’ own "Right In Time" – this is what’d be happening if her lover were there.

And "Night Accident" is one for the ages. With portentous guitar moans and a bare rhythm that pulses as painfully as a guilty conscience and as inevitably as a train moving down a long, slow grade, the song recounts a story of betrayal and revenge that may well be as harrowing as any ever written. I fear if I saw Fulks do it live, he’d murder it with some wisecrack or goofy mugging. But on Let’s Kill Saturday Night, it makes the hair stand up on my neck. And that’s a response I always trust.

LYLE LOVETT
Step Inside This House
MCA

It’s easy to forget that Lyle Lovett’s musical roots run deep in the heart of Texas songwriting. In recent years, his music has leaned heavily toward R&B, jazz and gospel, sounding ever further removed from the country music charts where he first made his mark in the mid-’80s. Step Inside This House is hardly an attempt to regain country radio airplay, but it’s definitely a step back toward Lovett’s musical origins. A two-disc set consisting solely of cover songs penned by Texas songwriters, it’s a genuine acknowledgment of primary influences, a way for Lovett to shed light on many of the mentors who helped make him the musician he has become.

Disc one serves as a broad overview, with songs by ten different writers plus a traditional tune. Particularly memorable is the title track, a Guy Clark song that sounds as if it probably influenced "This Old Porch", a staple of Lovett’s catalog co-written with Robert Earl Keen. Fittingly, Keen gets his moment here too, as Lovett delivers a sterling rendition of "Rollin’ By". Other high points include Vince Bell and Craig Calvert’s "I’ve Had Enough" (Lovett contributed backing vocals on Bell’s recording of the tune four years ago); David Rodriguez’s "Ballad Of The Snow Leopard And The Tanqueray Cowboy"; and "Sleepwalking", which is apparently the first new Willis Alan Ramsey song to reach the record racks in more than a quarter-century (the reclusive Ramsey has never followed up his landmark self-titled debut of 1972).

Three other songwriters featured on the first disc – Townes Van Zandt, Walter Hyatt and Steven Fromholz – are subjected to a sharper focus on disc two, which opens with three Fromholz tunes collectively known as the "Texas Trilogy". Lovett seems to be on a mission here to remind folks of this once-prominent tunesmith from the mid-’70s outlaw country heyday; Fromholz wrote songs recorded by the likes of Willie Nelson and Jerry Jeff Walker, yet his name draws blank stares nowadays.

The rest of the second disc alternates between songs by Van Zandt and Hyatt – both of whom left this mortal coil in the past couple years – before closing with the gentle traditional "Texas River Song". As with the whole of Step Inside This House, Lovett isn’t aiming to ape the styles of the writers: His Hyatt numbers don’t swing, his Van Zandt covers aren’t pickin’ country blues. Rather, the often piano-based arrangements are elegant and eloquent, characteristics more common to Lovett’s own musical touch.

But they do bring out the grace and beauty inherent in these writers’ works. In particular, Hyatt’s "I’ll Come Knockin’" – which does not appear on any of the four currently available CDs by Hyatt or his old group Uncle Walt’s Band – becomes, in Lovett’s hands, a lullaby for the ages, reason enough in itself for this record to exist. Indeed, Lovett’s reverence for the material, and for its authors’ influence on his own music, helps bring out the best in him on Step Inside This House.

– PETER BLACKSTOCK

SPINANES
Arches And Aisles
Sub Pop

Sometimes you can tell a lot just from the titles. A made-up word, "Eleganza", that nails the feeling perfectly; a seemingly out-of-nowhere sports-related reference, "Heisman Stance"; harking back to days of innocence with "72-74". None of the song names offered by Rebecca Gates (ultimately the only Spinane) are straightforward or ordinary; like her music, they seem to be fragments snatched from daydreams, places where nonlinear thought is the norm and sound floats by on waves of color that conform to the shape of the very air that surrounds you. It’s a mood thing.

A good half or so of Arches And Aisles reaches those moods as well as the highest points of her previous outings, most notably the Spinanes’ first couple 7-inch singles, which glowed with a magic Gates has been hard-pressed to recapture ever since. This time out, she’s found a different way to get there, using a few studio bells & whistles and, most significantly, various tonal backdrops fashioned by keyboards to create a canvas for the off-kilter wordstrings and guitar licks that populate her songs.

But the end result is the same: There are moments during "Kid In Candy" and "Greetings From The Sugar Lick" and "Slide Your Ass" and "Reach V. Speed" and "Den Trawler" when all the surroundings fall away again, leaving the real world behind, drifting and fading into that place only the beauty of music can touch.

– PETER BLACKSTOCK

SANDMAN
Love’s Hangover Sale
City Limits/Loner

Artists who spend too much time living idealized versions of other people’s pasts – say, Riders in the Sky, new jackshit swing bands, or eleventh-generation punk heroes – rarely get the music right. The clothes are easy. The past is as tantalizing and unknowable as the person (or pillow) you sleep next to and, in any event, the nebulous act of creation is inevitably a vision of the future, even if it seeks to recreate the past.

Courtesy Billy Bragg & Wilco, we’re do for a spate of Woody Guthrie revivalism, which, if it inspires people to pick up guitars and write topical songs again, isn’t all bad. That is, if their songs aren’t about hoboing and union miners.

Enter, two paragraphs late, Chris Sand. Evidently a Montana-bred songwriter, Sandman has fallen in with the lo-fi DIY crowd in Olympia, Washington (think Beat Happening and Bikini Kill). Love’s Hangover Sale, presumably his debut, is the fruit of that unexpectedly fruitful union. His topical Guthrie-isms and guitar phrases fuse easily with a slight beatnik cadence; tossed together with (as he sings in the delightful concluding "Two Key-Chains") everything from Elvis and Beck, Sandman produces a thoroughly contemporary and unromanticized vision of the itinerant minstrel.

Or, more simply, Sandman has a plain-spoken voice, plays with words like a chef dicing fresh onion, plays a simple and effective guitar, and deftly manages to revisit the works of songwriters both classic (Utah Phillips and Jimmie Rodgers) and modern (Ben Harper), without subordinating his own intriguing voice. Except when he tries out Ernest Tubb’s "Thanks A Lot". Uh, no thanks.

"M For Montana", Sandman’s update of Rodgers’ "T For Texas", is the most transparent example of that fusion. Yes, it’s the classic song, but the words and the singer’s presentation of those words make no attempt to revisit the 1930s. His straight originals are even better, notably the title track, "Hole Digger", and "Tractor Pull", all of which arise from the same dusty world Guthrie wrote about without being mired in the dust of Guthrie’s tradition.

– GRANT ALDEN
(Loner, 511 7th Ave. E., Olympia, WA 98501; 360.754.1728.)