February 29, 2008
Brighter Than Creation's Dark
(New West)
(NODEPRESSION.NET) -- I have never quite loved the Drive-By Truckers.
For one thing, I have always been a little put off by the awkward self-awareness of Patterson Hood's ambitions. God knows the moral and cultural geography of the modern south cries out for cartographers, but it's one thing to talk about a map -- he talks about it a lot -- and another to draw it. Hood is a messy draftsman, sometimes relying on broad lines when he needs shading, sometimes counting on vague gestures to carry meaning that he himself hasn't really thought through. ("The duality of the southern thing" sounds smart enough when you hear him say it, but it doesn't actually communicate much.) And like Paul Westerberg, one of his obvious influences, he's gotten less funny as he's gone along, maybe mistaking a straight face for seriousness.
Then there's the matter of the tunes. Although the Truckers' catalogue has plenty of good ones, Hood is kind of a journeyman when it comes to melodies and hooks. For every sing-along chorus ("My roommate's gun got nine bullets in it"), there are a bunch of songs that get by on sturdy chord progressions and rock wallop.
Hood, to his credit, seems to know this, and has always been generous in giving space to his bandmates. The contributions of Mike Cooley and -- for the three albums before this one -- Jason Isbell have provided variation in tone and texture, not to mention some of the Truckers' best songs. Still, by the time of A Blessing And A Curse in 2006, the band was in a groove that flirted with a rut. The midtempo rockers blurred together, and the vaunted three-axe attack tended to make the songs more loud than interesting.
But Isbell's exit last year, under whatever version of events you choose to believe, created a natural break in the band's development, a chance to pause and regroup. The Truckers reacted with the Dirt Underneath tour, playing stripped-down versions of their songs and reconnecting with old friends. One of those was Muscle Shoals vet Spooner Oldham, who appears on the new album. Another was pedal steel player John Neff, an original member who has long toured with the band and was invited in on a permanent basis. His fine, empathetic playing preserves but fundamentally alters the three-guitar lineup. And when it came time to record the new album, the third songwriting slot was filled, somewhat soap-operatically, by Isbell's ex, bassist Shonna Tucker. (A rock 'n' roll breakup: He got the solo deal, she got the band.)
The result is Brighter Than Creation's Dark, a wandering but largely satisfying album. It brings back some of the twang and front-porchiness of the past -- the first track has a banjo -- but the songs have a maturity you'd hope for from a band entering its second decade. And a pleasing modesty too, at least in declared intentions. There are stories of friends and family, smalltown oddballs and aimless old boys (and girls, courtesy of Cooley -- "She's got no money for a cab/She's way too drunk to walk").
"The Righteous Path" is a lament of an overstretched striver ("Got a whole lot of debt and a whole lot of fear") that taps into the national mood without trying too hard to embody it. "The Opening Act" is a shaggy-dog tale of early band days that seems fueled by equal parts nostalgia and whatever the opposite of nostalgia is. Even Hood's excursions into the bigger world -- specifically, two songs dealing with the Iraq war -- are more personal than political. Both have familiar protagonists -- a soldier haunted by the killing he did, and a wife left alone at home with the kid -- but their tight focus serves them well. (They would form a nice triptych with Isbell's "Dress Blues", which he initially performed with the Truckers before it ended up on his own album.)
Tucker is the album's wild card, and her three songs would be welcome if only for her voice, which is unpolished, full and sharp, like a bar-band Stevie Nicks. But the songs are good too, and one of them -- "The Purgatory Line" -- is a highlight. Over a spectral arrangement of keening guitars and cymbal washes, she sings about the uncertainty and impatience of emotional limbo: "Sometimes I can laugh, other times I cry/Ain't exactly funny, my feet are both on fire." It's an unresolved love song, but coming right after Hood's portrait of post-traumatic-stress, it becomes something broader: a song about trying to get over something, but expecting not to.
Cooley, meanwhile, contributes his most-ever songs -- seven, out of nineteen -- and almost every one's a keeper. He is the band's strongest melodist, and his lyrics have an offhand, sideways quality. One begins, "Bloody nose, empty pockets/A rented car, a trunk full of guns," and you don't need to know it's called "Checkout Time In Vegas" to get an idea what's going on. "Perfect Timing", on the other hand, is the breeziest song here, a good-natured shuffle about learning to live with yourself. Cooley also wrote my favorite track on the record, a catchy, half-hallucinated cultural history of the 1990s called "Self-Destructive Zones". ("The pawn shops were packed like a backstage party/Hanging full of pointy ugly cheap guitars.")
Despite the 70-minutes-plus running time, Brighter Than Creation's Dark doesn't feel either overloaded or epic. That is a credit to the generally strong material, and to its relative lack of pretension. Even the portentously titled closing track, "The Monument Valley", which starts out referencing John Ford and "the ironic nature of history," turns out to be about the complex compromises of adulthood. There are some big ideas here, but on the whole the concerns are more mundane than mythological, and the songs are all the better for it. The Truckers haven't settled for anything, they're still figuring themselves out. And if, seven albums in, their interests are smaller in scale and closer to home, that is mostly a sign of growing up. Which is good for them, and maybe good for the south, too.
-- JESSE FOX MAYSHARK
Copyright c. 2008 No Depression Inc. and/or Jesse Fox Mayshark
Posted by Grant at 2:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
February 27, 2008
Cinnamon Girl: Women Artists Cover Neil Young For Charity
(American Laundromat)
(NODEPRESSION.NET) -- Whether he speaks through the whisper of six acoustic strings or electrically rages through a distortion-heavy effects pedal, Neil Young rarely has a problem getting his musical message across. This two-disc tribute gives Young fans a chance to hear his music from a purely female perspective.
Tanya Donelly kicks things off nicely with "Heart Of Gold", which features a melodica in place of Young's harmonica; on the second disc, Donelly's former Throwing Muses bandmate Kristin Hersh puts her own stamp on "Like A Hurricane". The volume is turned up a bit with Euro-Trash Girl's treatment of the title track and Veruca Salt's wailing guitars on "Burned", gleefully contradicting the more sedate mood on the majority of the collection.
Standout performances include Lori McKenna's heartbreaking rendition of "The Needle And The Damage Done", Josie Cotton's "Cowgirl In The Sand", and Carmen Townsend's spirited take on "Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere". The best track comes from Jill Sobule, who sets the bar pretty high with a banjo-infused version of "Down By The River" (she cheats the concept just a tad, enlisting John Doe to sing with her).
The performances are fairly straightforward, and while not every single interpretation quite gets the job done, Young likely would appreciate most of the attempts. Listeners might be surprised at how many of his songs translate well to a female voice.
Proceeds go to Casting For Recovery, a nonprofit organization that provides support and education to women fighting breast cancer.
-- DEVIN GRANT
Copyright c. 2008 No Depression Inc. and/or Devin Grant.
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February 26, 2008
Long Way From Tupelo
(Perpetual Obscurity)
(NODEPRESSION.NET) -- As reworkings of the venerable Tupelo myth go, Paul Thorn's fifth solo album more than holds its own. The Mississippi town has become shorthand for southern tragedy; to invoke it is to invoke the rising and falling -- and intimations of another rising -- arc of whatever remains of the American dream.
Thorn actually hails from Tupelo, and this collection is distinguished by the changeable nuances of southern life. "We met at a church social over ice cream and chemistry," Thorn announces on the album-opening "Lucky 7 Ranch". Like so many of these songs, conflicts of class, race, creed and generation lurk behind the story of doomed passion. The title cut is even more explicit, turning a tire blowout and an encounter with the farmer's daughter into a story of temptation and betrayal that overcomes the cliched plot by force of Thorn's not-so-tough-guy growl.
A student of the folk artist Howard Finster, Thorn understands the power of character portraits, and what he lacks in Finster's humor, he makes up for in generous musical instincts. The core band of guitarist Bill Hinds, keyboardist Michael Graham, drummer Jeffery Perkins and bassist Doug Kahan get a taut, muscular, blue-rock sound, with lots of gospel overtones.
The last track, "When The Long Road Ends", is the sparest, a father's wish for a child (a la "Forever Young") that flirts with unfiltered sentimentality. "Then we'll both look back over where we've been," Thorn sings on the chorus. "We will have no regrets when the long road ends." His conflicted portraits may suggest otherwise, but it's an inevitable final, hopeful prayer.
-- ROY KASTEN
Copyright c. 2008 No Depression Inc. and/or Roy Kasten.
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Golden Delicious
(ATO)
(NODEPRESSION.NET) -- Eight years after the demise of his band Soul Coughing, Mike Doughty still sings as though readying himself for a low canine growl, or as if a thin layer of gravel that he can't quite dislodge is tickling his throat. On his third studio solo album, that voice goes well with his observations, which alternate, in no particular pattern, between declarative song-title refrains ("I Wrote A Song About Your Car", "I Got The Drop On You") and askew angles on the usual modern singer-songwriter concerns (audience behavior at gigs, memories of school, love stories). The music isn't nearly so askew, especially compared to the artfully disjointed quality of Soul Coughing, yet Doughty and his fellow players only skirt and never embrace the white-funk and folk-club cliches of most of their peers. True to its title, the flavor of Golden Delicious is tartly, strangely familiar, while Doughty remains familiarly strange.
-- JON M. GILBERTSON
Copyright c. 2008 No Depression Inc. and/or Jon M. Gilbertson.
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February 24, 2008
Rain
(Rykodisc)
(NODEPRESSION.NET) -- Artistic evolution has been a hallmark of Joe Jackson's career, from shifting band lineups to his early identification with new wave through forays into reggae, jump blues, sophisticated pop, and classical. On Rain, his first studio album in five years, Jackson summons his original rhythm section of bassist Graham Maby and drummer Dave Houghton, but he alters his sound by forgoing lead guitar in favor of his piano.
The move to a trio format opens up the songs and gives plenty of space to each instrumentalist. "The Uptown Train" has a brisk, jazzy feel as Jackson broadens his vocal range with an effective falsetto. "King Pleasure Time" and "Good Bad Boy" evoke the feisty attitude and spirit of his Look Sharp and I'm The Man albums. Jackson's frantic vocal is a good fit on "King Pleasure Time", which addresses the allure of addictive behavior. "Good Bad Boy" is a look at the emptiness of image making in a celebrity-driven society.
Jackson tones down the rhetoric on "Solo (So Low)", a dramatic, if a bit overwrought, ballad that showcases his piano work. "Rush Across The Road" is a wistful slice of melodic pop about missed opportunities: "Funny how the blink of an eye can last forever/And how we think ourselves dry when it's now or never." At 53, Jackson sounds rejuvenated on Rain, like a runner hitting his second wind.
-- TOM WILK
Copyright c. 2008 No Depression Inc. and/or Tom Wilk.
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Hello Cruel World
(Big Barn)
(NODEPRESSION.NET) -- According to the title of Mars Arizona's latest release, the current state of affairs in the world is looking rather bleak. Though the album is filled with songs of struggle and sadness, Hello Cruel World is a bright spot on the Americana landscape. The San Francisco-based singer-songwriter duo of Paul Knowles and Nicole Storto manages to find the proverbial silver lining of good music while also conveying an overall sense of global disillusionment. The album's tasteful musical arrangements and spot-on harmony vocals are complemented by guest appearances from Al Perkins on pedal steel and David Grisman on mandolin. Along with thought-provoking original compositions, the duo also impresses by putting its own unique spin on songs from a broad range of artists including Neil Young ("Time Fades Away") and T. Rex ("By The Light Of A Magical Moon").
-- GREG YOST
Copyright c. 2008 No Depression Inc. and/or Greg Yost.
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February 22, 2008
Let's Talk About Love
(Aria B.G.)
(NODEPRESSION.NET) -- The first solo album in eight years by the eternally troubled Lurrie Bell was worth the wait. Man, was it worth the wait. The 49-year-old Lurrie, whose career has been derailed in the past by mental and alcohol problems that left him living on the street, lost both his father Carey Bell (the Chicago blues harmonica whiz) and his mate Susan Greenberg in the last year. He responds with a transcendent set heavy, though hardly slavish, on love songs.
And though nearly all the material is drawn from older Chicago blues masters, he's chosen wisely enough that most songs will be new to current listeners. They're also right up to date; consider Willie Dixon's "Earthquake And Hurricane".
Bell's tightly knit band functions as one big rhythm section, providing a springboard for his own muscular guitar solos, which synthesize West Side kings such as Magic Sam and Otis Rush with less obvious influences such as Wayne Bennett and Albert King, and are burnished to a bristling, fine-edged glare. Bell's raspy vocals are full of conviction on songs such as Dixon's "Chicago Is Loaded With The Blues", which would be nothing but clichés in the hands of most modern blues poseurs.
Whether pleading on "Turn To Me", getting all funked up on "Cold Chills" and "My Dog Can't Bark", or romping through "Feeling Good", Bell brings his own distinct sensibility to the classic Chicago sound. The result is the most real -- and downright inspirational -- blues album in many a moon.
-- JOHN MORTHLAND
Copyright c. 2008 No Depression Inc. and/or John Morthland.
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February 21, 2008
Mockingbird
(New Line)
LIZZ WRIGHT
The Orchard
(Verve Forecast)
(NODEPRESSION.NET) -- Sometimes Lizz Wright, the minister's daughter, and Allison Moorer, the ex-marine's daughter, close in on a note and sound almost like the same woman, but they're not. Their experiences of being female and southern and alive are entirely different, and so -- usually -- are their voices.
The Orchard, Wright's second recording with Craig Street (this time with Calexico supporting), seems largely to have grown from a songwriting partnership with Toshi Reagon. More importantly, Wright's third album is the first to cohere around a theme, to tell a story, however circumspectly, becoming a thoroughly modern yet classically constructed album of love songs.
The opening "Coming Home", the beautifully languid "When I Fall", and the simply beautiful "This Is" are -- almost -- as good as anything Wright didn't write. "What is this? My heart," she sings, and makes that discovery new, and delicious, opening herself all the way up in "Song For Mia".
Nevertheless, the most striking of Wright's new songs still come from elsewhere. Her reinterpretation of the early Ike & Tina Turner hit "I Idolize You" strips away the feral girl-group impetuousness of the original to discover the sophisticated tension of a far more adult relationship.
She follows that with Bernice Johnson Reagon's "Hey Mann", a calmly rapturous tale (from Toshi's mother, the beloved leader of Sweet Honey In The Rock) of joy at discovering that the high walls around one's heart had unexpectedly been breached. To say nothing of a surpassingly gentle (and then, not!) reading Wright gives Led Zeppelin's otherwise modestly baroque "Thank You", nor the nod to Patsy Cline's "Strange". Whoever is matching these songs to her voice has fabulous ears. ("Strange", incidentally, makes a nice counterpoint to Kate McGarrigle's "Go, Leave" on Moorer's album.)
Moorer's ambitions for Mockingbird seem quite different, for her sixth studio album is the first not to be built around an often very private narrative. With the exception of the title track (and it's about as good as anything she's written), Moorer has put aside her pen and picked through the work of other strong, female songwriters. Though she is quite serious about her work, she is also playing here.
And in producer Buddy Miller, she has, of course, found an amiable and supportive collaborator. The title track suggests some of what she has to gain, for it sounds very much like Allison Moorer. Only as the album wears on does one sense how much fun she is having as a singer when her natural rhythms are challenged by those of other writers.
There is some rashness to her selections. What is left to do with "Ring Of Fire", and how does one make Patti Smith's "Dancing Barefoot" fresh? She slows June Carter Cash's song and luxuriates in its words; the cadences of "Dancing Barefoot" seem archaic, the chances it once took now seem pedestrian, but one only learns that by listening to Moorer discover she really isn't so savage, after all.
Ah, but, yes, she can swing right through Nina Simone's "I Want A Little Sugar In My Bowl", she can get plenty of dirt on Ma Rainey's "Daddy, Goodbye Blues", and she can knock Gillian Welch's ambitious "Revelator" straight out of Buddy Miller's living room. And Julie Miller's "Orphan Train" in the bargain.
But it's the country song, in the end, that Moorer keeps for her own. It takes brass to tackle Jessie Colter's "I'm Looking For Blue Eyes", and Moorer stretches her voice almost unto breaking. Here is the payoff for all those experiments, all those borrowed moods. Moorer says it's the first song her father taught her, but it sounds here like a new beginning, a fresh way forward.
-- GRANT ALDEN
Copyright c 2008 No Depression Inc. and/or Grant Alden
Posted by Grant at 9:01 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
February 20, 2008
Jukebox
(Matador)
(NODEPRESSION.NET) -- On Cat Power's last album, The Greatest, she tried her hand at mid-century southern soul, surrounded by a backing band of back-in-the-day southern musicians. It was an album of originals that felt like a collection of old-timey covers: Cat Power in Memphis.
Jukebox, while similar to The Greatest in sound and feel, really IS a collection of old-timey covers, her second in a decade (after 2000's The Covers Record). Backed by a band that includes members of the Blues Explosion and Delta 72, Cat Power (a.k.a. Chan Marshall) slouches her way through a compelling and maddening and frequently remarkable grab-bag of songs ranging from the obvious (Joni Mitchell's "Blue", Bob Dylan's "I Believe In You") to the powerfully strange ("New York, New York", which is poorly mixed, but a bad idea in any case).
Marshall has an extraordinary voice, built both for sadness and remove: She's either incapable of irony, or incapable of anything else. Jukebox is comprised of vast, arid patches of affect broken up by occasional tiny outbursts of emotion. Her rendering of "Aretha, Sing One For Me" (popularized by R&B singer George Jackson) is simply sublime, as is an almost-snappy take on James Brown's "Lost Someone".
Elsewhere she's too careful, too grave, to make these songs her own. Unlike The Greatest, which was bona fide to its bones, Jukebox occasionally feels like something made by a downtown hipster surrounded by other downtown hipsters who are merely playing at a sound, instead of inhabiting it.
-- ALLISON STEWART
Copyright c. 2008 No Depression Inc. and/or Allison Stewart
Posted by Grant at 8:31 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
February 19, 2008
Working Man's Cafe
(New West)
(NODEPRESSION.NET) -- Though it has been decades since I've had a favorite band, in the days that I did, no band touched me more deeply than the Kinks. If memory serves, the band of the brothers Davies reigned longest atop my pantheon of favorites (succeeding the Rolling Stones, anticipating Mott the Hoople and Roxy Music). During the Kinks' creative heyday of the late 1960s and early '70s, the music touched chords -- wistfulness, longing, a creative tension of wry intelligence, brittle emotion and reckless abandon -- that was beyond the realm of almost any other rock.
Favorite bands inevitably either break up or outlast their reason for being, turning themselves into product machines and touring self-caricatures. Yet the Kinks' belated demise (did they ever really announce a breakup?) has had a liberating effect on its frontman, whose solo career has found him flying under the radar, but whose music recaptures a sense of time and place evoked by superior Kinks efforts such as 1969's Village Green Preservation Society and 1971's Muswell Hillbillies.
On Working Man's Cafe, the time is now, and the place is what it must be in this day of globalization, outsourcing, cyberspace and American cultural imperialism -- an everywhere that feels like nowhere. Or at least it does to Davies, an artist on the cusp of turning 64, yet one whose aesthetic sensibility has changed little since he was in his mid-20s. Fact is, after the pre-punk bashing of "You Really Got Me" and "All Day And All Of The Night" (classics that owed as much or more to brother Dave's guitar), the young Davies often sounded like a much older man, living on memories, lamenting loss, evoking a better world than this but somehow sustaining a loopy-grinned optimism.
Thematically, much of this album can be heard as a post-millennial sequel to the Muswell Hillbilies song "20th Century Man", though it thankfully lacks the sort of heavy-handed conceptualism that marred lesser, later work. The opening "Vietnam Cowboys" shows the darker side of globalization, in which mass production in Saigon and layoffs in Cleveland are flip sides of the same coin. "Economic meltdown, nobody said it would last forever," sings the chipper Davies (while warning an unnamed president to "zip up your pants and get it together").
The lovely title track decries a neighborhood lost to American chains and internet cafes, with the singer "looking for some place to fit in." "Peace In Our Time" encompasses both foreign wars and domestic squabbles, in a world that is "just like a roller coaster, if you let it it'll crush you down." The sharpness of Davies' social commentary finds its musical match in riveting hooks and lilting melodies that have long characterized his best work.
If there is no "Waterloo Sunset" here, no "This Is Where I Belong", no "Days", perhaps only a younger artist can ache with such beauty. And perhaps it's unfair to expect any artist to do what he's done before, though the sunrise urban vignette of "In A Moment" provides a bookend of sorts for "Waterloo Sunset", reminding that such a moment of paradise, like everything else, is transitory. Blink, and you've lost it.
Particularly encouraging is "The Voodoo Walk", which, after all these decades, sounds like nothing that Davies has previously recorded, and seems more like a sinuous cross between Chet Baker and Dr. John. Yet it's recognizably the work of the same artist responsible for not only the rest of the album, but for one of the most underrated bodies of work in all of rock.
Though Davies is arguably the best songwriter the British Invasion produced, even at their popular peak the Kinks seemed more like a cult band, an acquired taste, never amassing the cultural currency of the Beatles or the Stones or the Who. Even so, none of Davies' Anglo contemporaries are still producing work that is not only as inspired as this, but renews the essence of what made the artist great in the first place. God save the village green.
-- DON MCLEESE
Copyright c. 2008 by No Depression Inc. and/or Don McLeese.
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February 14, 2008
Traveling
(98 Pounder)
(NODEPRESSION.NET) -- With a website that includes a song eulogizing a dependable piece of luggage, and the physical comportment of an aging ragamuffin, Steve Poltz clearly isn't looking to be taken seriously. Yet while some of his credentials are duly modest (like his tenure leading the Rugburns), one of his songs -- "You Were Meant For Me", co-written with Jewel -- is among the biggest hit singles of all time.
In further modesty, Poltz's latest release, Traveling, hardly presents itself as a work of long incubation, although it's just his third album in ten years. Not unlike Todd Snider, Poltz is a songwriter who figures just about anything that crosses his frame of perception will make a fit subject, regardless of import or triviality.
Thanks to this -- and also to a voice that combines a little bit of Gordon Gano, a little bit of Alex Chilton, and a lot of miles -- most of Traveling goes by with the pleasantness of a spring day that bends the mouth into a persistent smile. Tracks such as "I Think She Likes Me" and "Serve Me My Food" are novelty numbers sustained by steady roots-rock music.
When Poltz turns introspective, his eye for the odd but telling detail helps smooth over the jarring mood shift. In the rambling "Brief History Of My Life", a fondness for baseball radio makes the voice of Vin Scully palpable, and his brisk just-the-facts lyrics on "Street Fighter's Face" match the way his narrator, an Iraq-war veteran, would speak. If Poltz doesn't mean to be taken seriously, he does at least mean to take care with his craft.
-- JON M. GILBERTSON
Copyright c. 2008 by No Depression Inc. and/or Jon M. Gilbertson.
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