No Escape: A Tribute To Journey, Various Artists (Urinine Records)
If you polled all the music critics and asked them to pick the band
they hate the most you would undoubtedly hear the name "Journey" more than
any other. It's more than the band's plethora of hugely successful,
incredibly sappy, saccharine songs that make true music-lovers feel the suck.
It's also an easy choice, to the point of being cliché. Journey represents
the era of corporate rock, popular for awhile, but eventually discarded when
the public the band was so obviously pandering to eventually caught on and
gave up on them. When the sheep bail on you, it's real fucking obvious. But,
that's usually when it comes full circle. When the sheep hate you, en masse,
suddenly the music nerds discover you weren't so bad after all, and go after
the kitsch factor. It's the same sad pseudo-coolness making the stoners who
burned disco records in the late 70's excited when "Celebration" or "I Will
Survive" comes on at their local karaoke hole. No one is declaring the four
Journey songs covered on this EP are great shakes, song wise - that would be
the real lie - but there is the kitsch factor, the lovable cheesiness making
these songs so-bad-they're-almost-great. And the band did write a bunch of
hits, so people know who they are. The four indie bands on this CD are The
Ohms ("Anytime"), Houston ("Send Her My Love"), Wafflehouse ("Separate Ways"), and
Traindodge ("Only The Young"). Coming off the best is Houston, who gives "Send
Her My Love" a great Sonic Youth-like atmospheric lift, almost making the song
credible. The worst is Wafflehouse, who undoubtedly picked the sappiest song
ever, and suffers for it. Suffice to say I don't hold Wafflehouse responsible
just because they picked a shitty song to cover, but I do wonder about all
of these bands electing to give tribute to a band that derserves none. On
this Journey, there are no real winners - although the concept and the bands
trying their best trying to pump up crappy songs - do deserve some credit. {3 stars}--scott homewood
Pale Horse and Rider, These Are the New Good Times (Darla)
Sometimes places have power. Example A is Sacred Heart Studio in Duluth, Minnesota, a church turned recording studio that must have some of the best acoustics in the world (for a studio), judging by how crisply it has captured the music of those who record there. For his Pale Horse and Rider album These Are the New Good Times, Jon DeRosa traveled from NYC to Minnesota and recorded the album there with Alan Sparhawk of Low. The album sounds like it was recorded at an old church, meaning the sound is pristine and beautiful. And the songs he sings are suited to a place of beauty and history. They're folk songs, traditional in style if not in time period (as the few which weren't written by DeRosa were written by some of his contemporaries), about people and their lives. They're songs of love and loss and disappointment which feel old and new, which tell universal stories. The subjects go from the serious, like death and hard times, to the less monumental but still common to life, like flirtation and romance. The piano ballad "Sunday Matinee" (written by Marc Gartman, who plays banjo and piano on the album), might be the furthest from telling some colossal tale of yore, as it's about hearing a couple making love through the walls, yet it's one of the album's most beautiful songs. Each of the other 10 songs is drop-dead beautiful in its own right, from DeRosa's cover of his own Aarktica ballad "Aura Lee" to "The Prettiest Girl I've Seen Tonight (So Far)", which brings the album to a close with the image of a couple's drunken waltz to their car after the bar has closed. These Are the New Good Times was recorded in a timeless setting, draws from a musical style that bears ghosts of the past, and demonstrates the power of music in the here and now.
{www.palehorseandrider.com}--dave heaton
Pothole Skinny, Time Shapes the Forest Lake (Perhaps Transparent)
After 30 seconds of chimes deliver a warning notice that something ominous is to come, Pothole Skinny's Time Shapes the Forest Lake starts things off with a song that is, at first glance, a pleasant, melodic pop-folk song in the tradition of someone like Elliott Smith or Iron and Wine. Listen closely, though, and you'll hear words that are creepier than you might expect: "The thieves are gone/they're down at the pond/it's ten of them to one/but I got my shiny gun." The last two minutes of the song turn it into a slightly psychedelic jam, giving a strong sign of what's to come. Pothole Skinny's music is pretty, but it's not easy; the stories it tells are harsher and weirder than the ear-pleasing surfaces suggest. They're less a pop band than an art-folk group in the tradition of Ghost or Pearls Before Swine. A hazy mood hangs over everything, and it's either one of terror or peace; you decide. Their lyrics bear the air of fantasy tales or mythological legends (notice song titles like "When Morpheus Calls for Slumber"), but also a heavy portion of surrealistic ambiguity. Pothole Skinny use primarily acoustic and electric guitars, but also banjo, organ, cello, flute and more, to explore the ways that music can be both alluring and enigmatic. They take dives into dark psychedelia here and there, but even a gentle acoustic guitar can be bone-chilling if it's played right. Time Shapes the Forest Lake is unsettling and drop-dead gorgeous, often at the same time.--dave heaton
Issue 13, April 2003 | next article