We're a third of the way through 2002, and we might already have a winner for the coveted Most Misleading Album Cover Of The Year award. Squint your eyes and take a look: a bunch of meticulously rumpled bedheaded ladies and gents lounging on a vintage couch, one of whom is even reading a magazine with the Strokes on the cover for chrissakes. What's more, The Boggs are on Arena Rock Recordings, based in the trendy, scene-making borough known as Brooklyn (invest in Queens, people). So they've gotta be one of them garage bands the kids are diggin' these days, like the Yeah Yeah Yeahs or the Mooney Suzuki, right?
Ahhh, but my skin-deep deductive powers show their complete inadequacy approximately five seconds into the album, when opener "Whiskey and Rye" blasts off not with fuzzy power chords but with fierce mandolin strumming. It quickly becomes clear that the garage from which the Boggs' music emanates must be hay-strewn, with a lucky horseshoe tacked above the door-- if it's not a barn. More than any NME flavor-of-the-month band, The Boggs come off as kinfolk to The Pogues, with their reverence for traditional music and Jason Friedman's failed-Breathalyzer-test slur. Rather than the spooky melodies of the Green Isle, however, good ol' American bluegrass lies at the heart of The Boggs' music, no doubt sporting overalls and a straw hat to boot.
The Boggs seem less concerned with grafting old-fashioned sensibilities to 21st century innovations than they are with creating the most authentic-sounding facsimile of pre-Nashville country music possible. While the concept of attractive New York thrift-shoppers playing Appalachian folk may have a certain white-rapper sheen of questionable credibility to it, The Boggs at least know how to record their hoedowns properly. The sound is kept raw as a carpet burn, with the studio tracks sounding like the players are all hunched around a single microphone, the music blurred into a mish-mash of fiddle, accordion, harmonica, and found-item percussion. "On North Wood Ground" and the male/female call-response tune "Emily, O, Emily" take it even further, with answering machine-level sound that aims to replicate the days when wax cylinders were the industry standard.
Sadly, The Boggs frequently seem to forget the other aspect of high-quality bluegrass: keeping things lightning-fast and ADD-short. "A Picnic Lunch Packed for Two" and "The Airborne Station" both do a bang-up job of showing why punk is just a couple steps down the genre family tree from bluegrass. But on other tracks the simple, repetitious arrangements get a little tiresome. With little variation in song structure, and with Friedman not exactly a fountain of lyrical enunciation, there's not much to hold a listener's interest beyond the first couple times through the verse/chorus on "Beside the Windowsill" or "How Long?"
Still, you have to credit The Boggs with having a different sound, one that allows me to use country-fried terms like 'barn-burning' and 'skeedaddle-rific' to describe above-average tracks like "Over the Way" and "A Direction Taken." It's amusing to imagine the Camper Van Beethoven-like outsider role they must play in the ultra-cool Brooklyn scene, performing in front of crowds too concerned with maintaining their studied ennui poses to give the music the elbows-splayed chicken dance it occasionally deserves. While We Are The Boggs We Are might only be a fair collection of old-timey music, at least it doesn't have the nasty Grammy aftertaste of the O Brother, Where Art Thou? soundtrack. Plus, they're a lot cuter than Ralph Stanley.
