As any one of the ambivalent trust fund babies, faultily wired day traders, and other sordid mouse jockeys with the spare time to read my reviews will be able to attest: I like country rock. I can't help it. Raised in a sea of Neil Young's rumbling rockers and rustic ballads, country rock seems like the natural state of music to me, with other genres and subgenres bastardizing its bedrock and branching out into the expanse. As flawed as I have to admit that feeling is, I have no control over myself. I'm a sucker for the harmonica. Play me a mandolin and I'm as pliable and receptive as a divorcee in the back seat of her stockbroker's BMW. (My friends tell me it's quite a sight.)
So, I should love the latest Old 97's release, Fight Songs. The band's named after a train, for Christ's sake, and after their clever and tuneful Too Far to Care, I waited with baited breath for its follow up. And waited. And waited. Finally-- and mysteriously covered in Bolivian stamps-- the package from Pitchfork arrived. Tossing the remainder of the package's contents somewhere I hope to locate again soon, I grabbed Fight Songs and shoved it in the stereo.
Now, when the latest breed of country rockers sprung out of who- knows- where in the late '80s, the critics occasionally called it "insurgent country," other times "alt-country," and, on rare occasions, even "country punk." But what emanated from my speakers that fateful night was neither insurgent nor alt, and it was most certainly a far cry from punk. But enough of what Fight Songs isn't.
What Fight Songs amounts to is a collection of insipidly pleasant, well- executed pop songs of some distant relation to country and, as such, a harrowing disappointment. Gone is Rhett Miller's quirky wordplay-- it's replaced with platitudes aplenty. Miller's vocals, a welcome respite over the edgier tunes gracing Too Far to Care, abets the band's pop intentions, only exacerbating matters. The album's opener, "Jagged," kicks off with a craggy Crazy Horse- lite riff before dissolving into a toothless wonder, setting the table for what follows. It's not so much that the songs fail as a result of their pure pop sweetness, but rather they miss their marks in their size. These are very small pop songs. A great majority of the album ("Oppenheimer" and "Nineteen" are prime examples here) is almost unbearably earnest.
Late last year, I fiddled as Rome burned. While other music writers decried the industry mergers and feared that the rosters that would inevitably be cut as a result, I naively assumed that the indie labels would pick up anything of worth. Now, irony of ironies, I sit here with this shoddy Old 97's disc-- diligently packaged and delivered by Elektra Records-- while the latest Luna release sits in import limbo. Well, at least the three bucks I get for trading this sucker in will help defray that import sticker price...
