|
 Southern
Comfort
Drive-By
Truckers
Decoration
Day (New West)
If you’re among the uninitiated, consider track no. 3, “Hell
No, I Ain’t Happy,” your admission ticket to the world of
Drive-By Truckers. The song starts with the icy-wet crack
of a beer can, and then a hot rash of guitars so ominous they’d
send Crazy Horse running for their polite canyon homes. The
final straw is Patterson Hood’s fever blister of a voice (once
perfectly described as “Don Henley with a throat full of hot
gravel”), which flat-out spews, “There’s a lot of bad wood
underneath the veneer!” This is, how you say, a metaphor—and
a mighty sinister one at that—that applies more to the singer’s
state of mind than to the porch out front.
Somewhere around the ’90s, Drive-By Truckers were a mediocre
roots-rock band in the mediocre vein of the Bottle Rockets.
Their paradigm shift came with Southern Rock Opera,
a two-CD song cycle based loosely (very loosely) around the
legend of Lynyrd Skynyrd. The album found them embracing their
Alabama roots (the positive/negative duality of the “Southern
thing”) and ditching any lingering desire to be Yankee punk
rockers. If sometimes contrived (especially in spoken-word
places), it was one of few recent attempts to take the rusticus
genericus genre in an interesting direction. This wasn’t
Car Wheels on a Gravel Road, but Car Wheels Peeling
up to the Front Door, Mind Squirming.
The sheer audacity of the move garnered heaps of press. So
how does a group follow the bombast of Southern Rock Opera?
With an even better collection of songs, opera not included.
Somewhere along the line the group also learned to play, and
Decoration Day finds them moving into ever subtler,
occasionally acoustic regions where the devil’s in the details
(“Something ’bout the wrinkle in your forehead tells me there’s
a fit ’bout to get thrown”). “Sink Hole” refers to the place
where the banker with foreclosure on his mind is going to
end up if he sets one foot on the multigenerational farm.
The instructional “Outfit” has “anthem” written all over it
(“Don’t call what you’re wearing an outfit,” etc.), while
the passive voice in “My Sweet Annette” (“My Sweet Annette
was left standing at the altar”) indicates that the singer
feels bad enough about it to write this song, but is still
a bit in denial. But there’s nothing lunkheaded about Decoration
Day: just more human complexity than Faulkner’s Snopes
clan—and real prettiness too.
—Erik
Hage
Eamonn
Vitt
Deserted Music
(Self-Starter Foundation)
With just nine songs in 30 minutes, Eamonn Vitt’s debut, Deserted
Music, is a delightful rarity in this era of long-winded
stuff-’em-because-you-can CD re-leases. Formerly a member
of the Boston-based Karate, Vitt left that band in ’97 and
relocated to New York City for the decidedly non-indie-rock
undertaking of studying medicine at Columbia University. Continuing
his musical pursuits, he reemerged as a solo act. The arrangements
on Deserted Music vary from folklike quietude to full-blown
pop smarts, occasionally even bordering on the cinematic (as
on the desert hoedown “Left at Gallup”). His lyrics wed brief
but sharply detailed poetic descriptions to a range of existential
circumstances. Vitt sings with a friendly warmth, with his
voice treated as one of the components in the music, moving
in and out of the shadows rather than exclusively dominating
the spotlight with music in the background. “Mixed Drinks”
is the gorgeous and subtle centerpiece to the album, evoking
surprisingly emotional responses through both words and sounds:
Harmony vocals and layered guitars make for a tapestry that
oozes sweet wistfulness while referencing metaphorical imbibing.
—David
Greenberger
 Warren
Zevon
The Wind (Artemis)
Kicking against the pricks, raging against the dying of the
light, Warren Zevon challenges death itself in The Wind,
likely his last album. He protests, in the hard rocker “Disorder
in the House”; he makes love, in “El Amor de mi Vida”; he
perseveres, in “Rub Me Raw.” Above all, he prevails. Zevon
was diagnosed with terminal cancer a year ago, so it’s impossible
to listen to this without being moved by its subtext as the
swan song of one of rock’s iconic mavericks, who made listening
interactive and intelligent in the flouncy, sentimental ’70s
with songs like “Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner” and
“Lawyers, Guns and Money.” Songs just as memorable populate
Zevon’s new album, recorded in haste and creativity last fall
and winter after the 56-year-old Los Angeles singer-songwriter
learned he had only months to live. He ain’t dead yet, and
his friends help him keep the nail from the coffin here. An
all-star cast helps out on one of Zevon’s best albums, but
this isn’t about cameos. One could argue that for once, death
obviates budget, allowing Zevon to enlist buddies Jackson
Browne, Bruce Springsteen, Emmylou Harris, Tom Petty and most
of the Eagles. They play so well, the music is more party
than funeral, and commerce doesn’t seem to figure. The
Wind, which exemplifies bittersweet at its best, is about
knocking on heaven’s door and being told to come on in. If
you can listen to this without crying—and exulting—turn yourself
in for a new model.
—Carlo
Wolff
The
Codetalkers with Col. Bruce Hampton
Self-titled (Harmonized)
For more than 30 years, Bruce Hampton has found surprising
ways to inject his fractured surrealism into assorted musical
enterprises. His reputation was built upon the Hampton Grease
Band, a sprawling amalgam from Atlanta who created one of
the most unexpected double albums to ever be brought forth
by a major label (Columbia, in 1971). His projects since the
’80s have him as a team player more than a leader, first with
the Late Bronze Age, followed by the Aquarium Rescue Unit,
the Fiji Mariners, and now the Codetalkers. What they all
have in common is a jam-band groove sensibility, drawing variously
from rock, jazz, Latin, and country. This album rises and
falls depending upon your attachment to such boogie variants.
It truly rises when Hampton steps to the fore, which he does
only occasionally, but does here closing the set with one
of his stream-of-consciousness rambles, “Rice Clients.” I
could use a whole disc of that talk, punctuated with his cackling
laughter.
—David
Greenberger
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