In 1995, I would have put money on Jay Farrar having a more celebrated post-Uncle Tupelo career than Jeff Tweedy. After the back-to-back releases of Wilco's lackluster A.M. and Son Volt's lived-in Trace, Farrar seemed destined for greatness, and Tweedy destined for obscurity. A few years later, I saw how wrong I was: It wasn't simply that Being There was that great a follow-up, but that Straightaways was such a fatally dull second album. Full of bland retreads of Trace songs, it started off ho-hum and went downhill from there, backloaded with so many downtempo, amelodic tracks that even Farrar couldn't seem to muster a committed performance.
As Wilco became one of the most critically celebrated bands in America, Son Volt tried to broaden its sound on Wide Swing Tremolo, but they were so stuck in a rut they could only disband, and Farrar released a couple of solo records that re-established a core audience without attracting much attention. Now, amid a softening nostalgia for the mini-movement Uncle Tupelo helped define and plans for a new Son Volt album this summer, Rhino is issuing A Retrospective: 1995-2000. Making absolutely no promise of definitiveness, the title says it all: It's 20 tracks culled from the band's three albums, along with a handful of covers and live takes.
Right off the bat, something seems askew: A Retrospective begins with "Drown" instead of "Windfall", which is both the lead-off track on Trace and the quintessential alt-country song, a perfect summation of the genre's aesthetic as it fuses travel, a.m. radio, steel guitar, and a driving desire to connect to something larger and older than yourself. That it has been relegated to second-track position seems an oversight, as are the omissions of Trace's Ron Wood cover "Mystifies Me", Straightaways's opener "Caryatid Easy", and Wide Swing Tremolo's "Dead Man's Clothes".
"Drown" (or, as I called it in college, "You're Cousin It") is perhaps the band's most recognizable track, but in the context of A Retrospective, it sounds nearly indistinguishable from songs like "Picking Up the Signal", "Creosote", and "Driving the View", all of which utilize the same formula: tight mid-tempo rhythm section with no drum fills; wide-open guitar sound; a big, low voice delivering lyrics that don't always bother to make sense. The number of such tracks on A Retrospective makes it surprisingly monotonous, especially for a best-of comp that has so much material from which to cull.
Aside from the live acoustic versions of a few songs, the added extras on A Retrospective are six covers that exhibit a greater diversity than the album tracks. Son Volt's late-90s take on the Del Reeves trucker anthem "Looking Through a Windshield" has aged about as well as early-00s trucker caps, and Farrar can't muster the excitability on Springsteen's "Open All Night" to sell lines like "I'm goin' out tonight/ I'm gonna rock that joint." But his hangdog vocals contrast dramatically with Kelly Willis's sharp croon on Townes Van Zandt's "Rex's Blues", and Farrar sounds like a drunk staggering down the hall-- in the best way possible-- on Alex Chilton's "Holocaust".
I don't begrudge Son Volt their modesty of sound and scope, nor do I hold it against them that they weren't Uncle Tupelo or Wilco. There is something refreshing, if only briefly so, about the band's unalterably limited range, especially when compared with Tweedy's self-consciously aggressive innovation. If nothing else, A Retrospective at least marks the moment when these three bands have diverged so dramatically from each other that any comparison between them becomes more nostalgic than musical.
