In case you don't know who Brute is: hang on to your indie cred, activate your patchouli filters, and then answer me this: why does Vic Chesnutt (who is so irrevocably cool) make records with Widespread Panic (who are so irrevocably not)? I don't mean to over-refer to the car accident that handicapped Chesnutt, but he is a jalopist: his music peaks when it's wreckage-esque, arranged in a dangerous and fragile fashion that fits the stark goulash of his boondoggler-philosopher persona. And here he is in Brute with the airtight Widespread Panic, who check every valve like purgatorial Pep Boys. I wonder if Birkenstocks outnumber Campers at their live shows.
For chrissakes, Vic Chesnutt was in Sling Blade! Remember when drizznunk, moodswinging Dwight Yoakam slams Chesnutt's wheelchair into the door, almost capsizing him? Sling Blade told it like it is-- showcasing power lines and potholes and crutches and fast food and armpit moisture, not Jennifer Love Hewitt in spaghetti straps bending over every six minutes. Like Fargo or Lone Star, it presented a region as its frumpy self, and dadgummit, that's how I like my alt-country/avant-roots/No Depression/cowpunk/ya'llternative/thunderplink/asscord/shitporch.
But on Cobalt, Panic fails to meet Chesnutt's dark vision even halfway. When the first song kicks in, you'll think you accidentally switched on an adult-contemporary station broadcasting a John Hiatt/Bonnie Raitt duet. The band's playing is clean, but straight-up soulless. What is it that their fans can't get enough of? "Man, bro, hey, bro, shazam, these jokers are technically proficient!" The showtune plod of "You're With Me Now" would bring the house down at your older stepbrother's sparsely attended second wedding, the band keeping it real like the Carnival Cruise poolside karaokist. "Adirondacks" starts with some Bob Seger electric piano before busting into a patented Counting Crows midtempo anthem; "Scholarship" offers guitar tones I haven't heard since Britny Fox broke up. This music is tame, tame Southern Rock, like the honeysuckle bloat of late Drivin' n' Cryin'.
Cobalt triumphs only on "Puppy Sleeps," a riff-anchored track with just enough ingratiating hangnail cracker-funk to transcend the Disney-does-Skynryd of its peers. My molten downstairs neighbor knocked on my door, incense wafting from her absorbent pajamas-- I'm thinking she'd finally come to borrow a cup of love, but nope: "What the hell are you playing that has that repetitive bassline?" I pretended to be an exchange student house-sitting for someone much cooler.
Yet, Chesnutt fans might wanna shell out their germy tender for Cobalt anyway, because Vic more than holds up his end of the bargain. His befitting themes of figurative paralysis, inertia, and atrophy all get thorough re-examinations. The drearier songs offer no escape; they're full of armory machinists, carpet plants and flour mills, and they recommend bridges from which "suicide is a cinch." The maudlin harmonica of "Expiration Day" is dead-on: Vic namechecks W.H. Auden and weird Southern county names, and his plangorous voice is as ripe as ever, despite what the twinklestains on Amazon.com say in their customer reviews about how the vox "leave alot to be desired" and aren't "Widespread quality."
Vic loves him some Latinate diction, and he enunciates it so much better than the thesaurus-boys in Bad Religion and Lullaby for the Working Class, exaggerating the mouthfuls like a phonetic alchemist. When he sings "stupid preoccupations," he sings "a-steyoo-peyid eh-paree-awk-cue-payaysheyuns." He continues to view the world as an equation (a habit he's had since the songs on his 1988 debut Little), condemning drug-culture friendships with the line, "All we have in common are psychoactive compounds," on "All Kinds," a classic peep at the problem of evil that harps on kiddie porn and "stale mounds of semen." But the overwhelming keeper is his new arrangement of old song "Cutty Sark." Panic performs a warm and subdued Lambchop impression, and the lyrics are a gold amalgam of Chesnutt's tendency to throw images together and see what happens-- a style that too often results in songscapes rather than songs, soundscapes that are often barren despite their crowdedness.
If this record had a dozen more like "Cutty Sark," I'd be lobbying for a 9+ rating and its subsequent canonization, hippie caravan and all. Hell, you can tell just by the pictures that stubbly, pensive Vic is the tormented bomb while Widespread are bootleg, all smiling with their flowing manes, ballcaps, and Reeboks. If you want an endearing jalopy, get the Ugly Casanova CD. If you're a die-hard Vic-ophile, get this anyway and make your own faux-folk cover art. Otherwise you'll be as embarrassed of Panic's presence as you are of that girl you made out with because she looked like Jeff Tweedy.
