Hopefully you aren't on the butt-end of an addiction to a substance or a person, and this album's title merely reminds you of the cubicle you built around your stereo to help you rehabilitate from rockism. Safe in your bunker from the Whitman-Guthrie-Dylan-Tweedy sperm tree, you could listen to the Knife and T.I. and Kelly (Osbourne/Clarkson) and Motown and showtunes without fretting about the authenticity myth or underdog messiahs, certain that the phrase "Austin City Limits" referred ironically to the limitations of the whole Rawbone McHeartfelt strum-and-bleat enterprise. Singer-songwriters, of course, are the dominating Bill O'Reillys of the music world, pretending a birthright to "the truth" while calling others elitist, etc.
Well, shoot. Rockists on the wagon will twitch around this album like an ex-drunk downwind of a sorority's recycling bin. Will Johnson, he of the three Misra bands and the singular, gorgeous husk-lite voice has dropped 47 minutes of perfectly performed sincere-dudes-with-guitars rock, almost enough to debunk as fallacious that which pluralists and pop historians might label the fallacies of his milieu. Live, Johnson is both stout and spry, like a stud leprechaun or a Hollywood version of a meth middleman, and he only smiles at his guitar or his drummer's drums. There is something generous about his anthemic tendencies and his prolificness, yet the songs can seem aloof or withdrawn.
Skeptics should approach this album from its adventurous rear: The explosive sing-along "Take a Rake" earns all of those planet-words (saturnine, mercurial, earthy) that the Secret Machines often seem to be pursuing, and the whomping riffage of its phallic coda hopefully presages the band's unsentimental-Zeppelin future. The muted but propulsive "Take the Maps and Run" is the least conventional composition, inhabiting that experimental-ballad zone where folks thought Wilco was headed after Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. The beginning of the record may seem like stately stuff for the Neil Young heads, with guitars both bedraggled and pristine, but the thud of "Calling Thermatico" makes Centro's last record seem twee. Warbled organs add future-boogie to "The Fugitives Have Won", and the backward loops and violins of "I See Through You" are a poppy field to ease the forlorn-parmesan lyrics: imagine a rustic Donovan, high on Ecclesiastes.
Ten years strong, this band exhibits a knowingness: when "In Such Crooked Time" threatens to clear out even the slow-dancers and fans of poetic phrasing ("on the shores of your decline"), the album re-abrupts with a fist-pumper called, winkily, "For New Starts." Critics dismissive of anything not novel seem like the backhanded targets of "Patience for the Ride"-- and that's on top of its class/political narrative and literally last-minute solo. The squall and tremelo contained on Fort Recovery alone could cause all manner of rockist relapses. Keep an antidote handy; maybe "Vacation" by the Go-Go's?
