Call me a heartless bastard, but I'm finding that I just don't have time for records like this anymore. 2000 turned out to be such an incredible year for new releases. For the first time in so long, music both challenging and infinitely pleasing has poured in from all angles-- music that either creates genres within genres, or totally redefines the familiar ones.
And then there's music like Mojave 3's Excuses for Travelers, which not only accepts genre stereotypes, but somehow seems to define the stereotype better than the stereotype itself. If I were to tell you that Excuses for Travelers is a folk-country record, my job would be pretty much done. Every song on the record contains some combination of strummed acoustic guitar, slide guitar, Hammond organ, harmonica, soporific vocal melodies and harmonies, and lyrics about love and/or pick-up trucks.
Mojave 3 frontman Neil Halstead does his best to sound "folky"-- he now ranks up there with Tom Petty on the list of people who make me want to go back in time and strangle Bob Dylan. Sure, we'd lose one of the great musicians of the 20th century, but think of all the shitty imitators we wouldn't have to deal with. And let's not even discuss the whole Jakob thing.
To even call Halstead a Dylan imitator, though, would be giving him more credit than he deserves. Whereas Dylan went through a period where his voice was whiny, nasal, and occasionally downright annoying, Halstead's vocals are just boring. Of course, that's the least of his concerns. Whereas Dylan truly broke new ground for rock lyricism, Halstead delivers lines like "I love the sun/ And the highlights in your hair/ They turn me on" with all the eroticism of a eunuch at the Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show.
Indeed, one of Excuses for Travelers' greatest weaknesses is that the album is too uniformly boring to be affecting in the least. Only two or three minutes into the record, you've already stopped giving a shit about what Halstead is saying. The words all seem to blur together into a beige-colored blob of monotony. By the middle of the album, odds are you're either reaching for caffeine pills to stay awake, or digging for another record to listen to.
It must be stated, of course, that there are people who will find this album incredibly appealing. If you've ever taken an acoustic guitar to a deserted beach and sang Woody Guthrie songs at the ocean, you may be one of them. If you've ever told anyone to "mellow out, man," you may be one of them. And if you think Jeff Tweedy is a "serious badass," you're definitely one of them.
To summarize: Excuses for Travelers is boring. It's about as dynamic and enthusiastic as an afternoon nap and half as refreshing. The guys and gals in Mojave 3 have made exactly zero attempts to take their sound further than 1998's fairly excellent Out of Tune, and as a result, there's little reason for this record to enter your collection. So I guess we have to face the facts: no matter how much rock music has evolved over the past 35 years or so, boring is still boring.
