On 2001's American Scene, Ashley Park were the lesser, naïve cousins of such variegated indie-pop bands as Beulah and every band Sasha Bell ever joined, content to simply emulate those they admired. Dawdling in what heartier music fans might affectionately call "puss-rock," Ashley Park doused their second album in barrelfuls of feyness, sullenness, aloofness, and non-alcoholic white wine. Their new album, The Secretariat Motor Hotel, dispenses with those rather poorly advised excursions into baroque, synth, and general Kindercore pop, and makes a full-length out of American Scene's "The Last Day in the Life of Grand".
What this means for the average listener can be easily summarized: This is the most startlingly stereotypical alt-country I've ever heard. So to felicitate this review, I decided to theorize a song representing every song on this album that, for the sake of convenience, I shall christen "It Looks Like the Farm's Horses Are Mighty Solitary in the Cosmos, Old Man Tuckerson" (this would not be the most ridiculous title on the album). I stole this paragraph from the rough draft of my Sweetheart of the Rodeo review. I apologize for not writing a new one, but I got a hot date:
"It Looks Like..." is a meandering ramble hidden in dewed bales of hay and rugged mounds of desert clay. Oaken guitars tortuously wrangle cattle, while the detached, conversational vocals circulate messages roughly equivalent to "I am always alone, except when in a passionate embrace with the woman I love even when she occasionally leaves me." The atmosphere of the production is a damp ditch in a trail leading to a snowy tavern. The songs are as exuberantly melodic as the performers are eerily disconsolate. It's the soundtrack to lives persecuted by society and befriended by airy pastures, families with straw on their backs, hail in their roofless bedrooms, sorrow in their consciences, and jubilance in their everyday lives.
I understand that sounds sarcastic, but that's more the fault of my inability to be sincere than any specific vindictiveness on my part. There's nothing inherently wrong with music that fits the above description. Hell, that review might as well be applied to the state of Vermont. It's one of those albums that's already present in everyone's consciousnesses, where you already know the direction of every chorus and the placement of every slide guitar solo. It adds and detracts nothing to the formula while being intended as little more than homage to a genre. The songs are rarely differentiated. Occasionally, some organs will slide under the dejected mood or Kelly Haigh's back-up vocals will become more prominent, but, for the most part, this may as well be one endearingly slothful 40-minute track.
