Most Messed Up –
Old 97’s
We’ve been
doin’ this longer than you’ve been alive,
Propelled
by some mysterious drive.
It turns out there was at least one meteorite-proof
dinosaur.
Old 97’s have been lumbering alone through deserted groves
of cycads, and along the shorelines of vast shallow inland seas, for years
now. The alt-country era is long
over. Jeff Tweedy, for example, has had
time to leave his original band, build his own proper band, tend to that band’s gentle decline, and then
wander away from it, too.
It has been more than twenty years. There is no No Depression. But somehow, like a Coelacanth in a modern ocean,
Rhett Miller and his band full of wiseass remain very much alive.
Their longevity has rendered a distinct fancy freedom of
loose feet. The thing is, when you’re
the last one left in the room, there remains no need for discretion, subtlety
or tact. One can enjoy one’s own private
oxymorons. Into a microphone. For wide release.
I’m not crazy
about songs that get self-referential,
Most of
this stuff should be kept confidential.
That whiskey-soaked chestnut arrives after a cool three
minutes of near-encyclopedic, um, references
to all manner of bar band debauchery.
The song’s itemized flagstones on the career path—highways, hotels,
dressing rooms, crowds, women and booze—would read as cliché had they not
successfully tripped up every other goddam one of the 97’s’ contemporaries. Old 97’s are still here, they are still fun,
and they therefore get to sing about all things in earnest tipsy celebration.
Smack dab in the middle of the stage remains Rhett Miller,
he of the smooth midrange voice and the jealousy-inducing
pre-rigor-mortis-Jagger good looks.
Miller’s natural, prototypical frontmannage makes a lot of sense as a
key element to the venerable success of Old 97’s, and his aim remains happily
true.
About the current lack of subtlety: track 3 is “Let’s Get Drunk & Get It On,”
and the title is the song’s point of greatest obfuscation. The lyrics are about what one would expect
(“you got a gorgeous face, though it’s a little odd,”) and the words make right
certain to get the hell out of the way in time for a guitar solo that sounds
like beer is splashing everywhere. The
guitar work here is miraculous for sounding directly descended from the 97’s of
two decades ago, with no steps missed.
It is somewhere in the murky middle of most country-rock
albums when the larger issues of despair, death, loss or Major Life Error tend
to appear—often accompanied by spare arrangements, low voices and pedal
steel. Most Messed Up definitely scrapes the bottom of the life barrel at
about the same spot, but (again) hilariously without reigning in the tempo one
little bit. “Wheels Off” (“that’s when
it got wheels off,”) “Nashville” (crappy person making crappy choices,) and
“Wasted,” (the title pretty much covers it) appear here back-to-back-to-back. Through it all, the volume and pace persist,
and the profanity flows as fast as the whiskey.
It is right around this same point in the album that
established fans of Old 97’s are going to start looking ahead to successive
songs, wondering when the Secret Weapon is going to appear. The weapon, of course, is Bassist and
spell-caster Murry Hammond, whose indirect light has been responsible for much
of the band’s career-long glow.
Throughout the band’s existence, Hammond has produced widely-dispersed
97’s songs that seem to function as dollops of superego in Miller’s id
recipes. Hammond is a few years older
than Miller, and now seems like he has been graying forever, and has remained
perpetually enshrined in his round-framed Dork Squad eyeglasses. Of course not all songwriting is biography,
but it is sometimes difficult not to see Hammond’s grinning trusty-sidekick
face in his songs when the songs themselves have been so comparatively mindful
and cautionary relative to Miller’s.
Oh, and they also tend to be gorgeous—an effect heightened
by Hammond’s voice, which resembles a sound from a blown $15,000 speaker. There is a faint buzz along the margin—a
crackle—which never fails to celebrate the good vanquishing the perfect. For years now, the occasional Hammond song
has allowed everyone—narrators, listeners, and perhaps even the angels
themselves—to pause, blink, remember and enjoy.
Which brings us to the cardinal shortcoming of Most Messed Up.
What did they do to Murry?
There is a Hammond song here, but there is no pause or relief. Every single one of the songs on Most Messed Up is a rocker, and that
includes the one titled “This Is the Ballad,” as well as the one that Hammond
sings (“Ex of All You.”) While it is
both fun and hilarious that the band are so far along the Good Timin’ Trail
this time out that they just wanted to shit-kick for a solid 40 minutes, there
is no patching the defect. The past few
albums brought us stunners like “The Color of a Lonely Heart Is Blue” and “You
Were Born To Be In Battle.” Hammond is a
difficult drug to quit.
Nevertheless, to give due credit: it is rare to find an album with so very many
exercises in brash proclamation in which not one of them fudges the margin with
Careless, or Half-baked, or Annoying.
That doesn’t happen once on Most
Messed Up. From the standpoint of
songcraft, nothing here is messed up, not even a little.
Back in the middle 1990s, when the stables were full of
Alt-country talent, Old 97’s would have been a hell of a long shot bet to be
the last and best band standing when the race track finally shut down. The
heat that fires bands like this, who make this kind of music…well that heat
melts them down, or blows them up, or it just goes cold.
Most (of those other bands) messed up. And to the credit of Old 97’s, they have
released arguably their least apologetic, least nuanced and loudest album 20
years after their first one, with seemingly less than one-millionth of the
reactionary posturing behind, say, R.E.M.’s Accelerate. Precisely zero of these songs sound lousy or
forced. And none of them sound fussed
with.
As the band themselves put it years ago: here’s to the halcyon.
Keepers 1-12
June 2014
