Throwback California country-rock
This Los Angeles country-rock group’s anthology re-imagines Big Star’s hopeful album title #1 Record as a joshing (or perhaps wishful) look back through a catalog that wasn’t really likely to find broad commercial fortune. A decade in the making – the band formed in 2000 – the songs cherry-pick the group’s four previous releases, adding an early demo, two previously unreleased tracks, and three new recordings. The band’s combination of tight country harmonies, shuffling rhythms, road-inspired topics, and flights of fiction mark them as natural-born citizens of Gram Parson’s cosmic American music colony. Their music offers reverence for the twang upon which it’s built, but there’s also humor, tongue-in-cheek paranoia and a liberal hippie environmental ethos running through their songs.
Coming together at the tail end of the Clinton administration and flourishing artistically during eight years of Bush, the band’s songwriters found plenty of grist for the lyrical social mill. They sing the praises of “Byrd from West Virginia,â€Â note his past membership in the Ku Klux Klan, and highlight his anti-war stance with a guitar, bass and mandolin waltz the fiddle-playing senior senator [1 2] would surely appreciate. There are songs of flower-child philosophy being passed to a new generation, pot farmers living off the gifts of “Humboldt,†meditative appreciations of the America’s open road beauty, sun-burnt runs through the desert, tears cried for the planet’s desecration (or as they label it “one sad valentine to Earthâ€), and ire leveled at capitalistic icons such as salesmen and self-help charlatans.
The group seems to have picked from their catalog a group of tunes that are more about people than between them. They lean towards first person articulation, songs sung to an absent ‘you’ and songs sung at the listener. Even the separation of “Up the Grapevine†is more an interior monologue than a conversation. Their namesake tune calls to like thinkers, “if you see hawks / then maybe we should talk,†seeking to gather rather than having kindred souls on hand. The protagonists aren’t isolated, exactly, but neither do they seem as connected to others as the band is musically connected to one another. “Bossier City†provides a few minutes of explicit intercourse as Rob Waller trades verses and harmonizes with Carla Olson. Waller’s duet with Carla Olsen on the newly waxed “Bossier City†breaks through that wall. Fans of the Flying Burrito Brothers, New Riders of the Purple Sage, Crazy Horse, Dave Alvin and the Gosdin Brothers should check this out! [©2010 hyperbolium dot com] 
MP3 | Humboldt
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Thanks for the review! Just want to comment on one line. We actually did include Byrd’s involvement with the Klan. Here’s the lyrics to the second verse:
“He burned the cross of Jesus in the West Virginia night
The darkness of America blinded his site
Baptized in the blood of our nation sin
the ghosts of the conquest rise again and again”
The song is certainly an anthem to Byrd’s more better moment’s but we didn’t want to neglect the darkness either. The courageous acts he made later in life certainly must be viewed through the lens of Klan, unfortunately. But we see the song, at least partly, as a song of redemption.
Indeed you do. We will file this under “reviewer should listen more carefully,” and we’ve updated the review. Thanks for the correction!