Loud, raucous, big: these are the words that come to mind when I think of the freight train that used to barrel down the tracks right in back of my best friend's house about 10 years ago. Twice a day, you could count on a little house-shaking, decibel-raising, window-rattling visit from "the neighbors" as we used to say. The Old 97's Elektra debut Too Far To Care is like that train: loud, raucous and big. And I've been playing it twice a day (sometimes more) almost like clockwork.
From the opening train-out-of-control rhythm of "Time Bomb" to the last fuzz-box wails of "Four Leaf Clover," a duet featuring Exene Cervenkova (ex-X), this gem rocks, rolls, careens, stomps its boots, tackles the navel-fixated American alternative scene in the mud and gets up laughing. Don't just take my word for it. New York City's Vin Scelsa (WNEW), one of the last DJs on American commercial radio truly paid to play whatever he wants, recently played six songs in a row from this album on the air. It was seven, if you count that fact that he played "Just Like California" TWICE. When was the last time you heard six songs in a row from the same band, from the same album, on a radio show that wasn't having a "rock block weekend"?
Hailing from Dallas, the Old 97's blast a rocking brand of alternative country that's big on electric guitars, snare drums and honkey-tonk themes like getting a girl, losing a girl, wishing you could get a girl and burning down the nightclub because you lost the girl and 1800 miles away.
What sets them apart from virtually every band, no matter the genre, are the catchy vocal and guitar hooks that populate every single song on the album. "Salome" is as beautiful as "Niteclub" is hilarious. "Barrier Reef" paints a drunken southern lounge-lizard scene that Jimmy Buffett would be proud of while "Big Brown Eyes" sits on a neat turn of a phrase in the chorus: "You make a big impression for a girl of your size, now I can't get by without you and your big brown eyes."
Rhett Miller handles most of the singing with a nod to Jeff Tweedy's Uncle Tupelo output and Ken Bethea's guitar is a tall mixed drink of twang, melody and crunch. But if I had to hand out a most valuable player award I'd give it to drummer Philip Peeples. It's hard to imagine this quartet, named for the 1906 ballad (and 1950's Johnny Cash hit) "The Wreck of the Old 97," without his bag-of-bones stick work or steam-train snare beats.
Wally Gagel (Folk Implosion, Tanya Donnelly, Superchunk and Sebadoh) engineered, produced and mixed the newest. Jon Rauhouse of Grievous Angels provided pedal steel and banjo.
Formed in 1993, the Old 97's aren't really a new band. The band's two in die albums, Hitchhike to Rhome (Big Iron Records) and Wreck Your Life (Bloodshot Records), are highly regarded for all the same reasons Too Far To Care is such a winner.
