07.13.06

The things you find when you pay attention - Drag the River review

Posted in drag the river, some albums we done liked others we ain't - July 13th, 2006 at 6:42 pm by Cricket

Dear punk bands I have known and loved, please all of you start making country albums. Thank you kindly, Cricket.

Okay, I’m lightheaded over this album, but I feel like it’s some huge failing on my part that I did not discover this band until now. A trustworthy friend told me to check them out amid all the buzz around their new album, so I picked it up and, damn, why haven’t I been listening to this forever?

Drag the River has apparently been making music in this incarnation for nearly a decade. That’s just about as long as I’ve been missing the Descendents, one of my all time favorite bands, and ALL, whose singer, Chad Price, heads up Drag the River. Clearly I’ve been awful on following up on what the members were doing after ALL and the Descendents, otherwise I would have know all about Drag the River, huh?

Their fresh, shiny new release is It’s Crazy and there’s also a history, previous releases, 7″s and eps for me to plow through. My birthday is apparently late this year, but AWESOME nonetheless. The line up here is almost an all-stars of old indie punk, though you can’t hear that at all on the album. It plays like alt.country should: pulling on country, folk and traditional music with a rock and roll backbone and a little somethin’ somethin’ that makes it rougher and more real than what you find in more generic country music.

Even though I have unending love for ALL vocalist Chad Price (and the song writing he does here), I think Casey Prestwood does the most impressive work here, on lead and steel guitar. Not only is his playing gorgeously done, it’s so well suited to these songs, it never feels like steel guitar slapped into another kind of music, but rather bleeds through each song like the glittery pulse of the music. Casey, originally of Hot Rod Circuit, has grown into what I hope to see more musicians of my generation do—take all the kinds of music they love and start making grown up music with it. While I’ll probably never stop listening to punk, it is the music of disaffected youth, and in some ways good country, real country, is actually a natural outcome from that youth. Casey, and Drag the River as a whole, is doing exactly what I’ve been hoping to see from the post-punk world. This music is incredible and I hope it’s the beginning of not a trend, but a huge wave.

As near as I can tell, this band is pulling out the old school punk/indie do-it-yourself for recording and getting an album out the way they want it. You know we here at HCT fully support that. It takes courage and love of what you’re doing to get it out there no matter what. So much better than piddling around hoping a major label will come along and pick you up (and then possibly destroy your music). Major labels aren’t necessarily the devil, I mean, I approve of being able to reach as large of an audience as possible, it’s just that to me getting it out there however you can means you love your music enough to go to extremes.

What about the album itself? Some of it was recorded in a garage and remixed in a studio, though that seems irrelevant when you listen to it; it’s tight and well put together, suffering from no overproduction at all, just good, clean sound the way country music was intended to be. I can imagine this is as good, if not better, live—sadly the band isn’t playing anywhere near me anytime soon, so I’ll have to rely on all of you to go see them and report back.

The vocals on this album are split between Chad Price and Jon Snodgrass each singing, I believe, their own songs. You can feel the shift in lyrical styles when the voices change, though the album is a unified whole, rather than a collection of different songs. The album bears up to multiple back-to-back listens, each time seems to bring highlight some new part of song you might have missed on the last listen.

“Mr. Crews” is a real stand-out right away. In both musical composition and lyrics.

Her naked body makes you feel the pain
Like rattler venom runnin’ through your veins
I’ve never seen this kind of beauty before
Mud, blood, lost love, liquor, guns, whores

It’s the kind of imagery I expect from this kind of music, just twisted slightly around and digging at something a little darker.

Next up, “Me and Joe Drove Out to California” will knock your socks off on every listen. It makes you want to put the top down and haul out to back country roads on a summer afternoon with your friends and sing out loud while drumming on the dashboard. Later you’ll listen to the song again in winter and it will always contain that summer day feeling, even if you never did drive around with the top down singing it.

“Know you’re right in how strong you must be to be with me” strikes out of “Beautiful and Damned” and pierces your heart, as Chad sings about the damaged and troubled girl he loves. This is a tragic, gorgeous and completely unsappy love song about suffering and staying. I really couldn’t ask for more from a love song.

There’s a deep twang, very traditional hum running through “Amazing G.” A dirty, coarse ditty about a stripper from down in the holler. It’s toe-tapping honky-tonk goodness.

Jon Snodgrass’s “Cousins’ is also stand out. It’s pure country, a little romantic, a road song, sung with the kind of reflective sense of loss you just really want in songs like this. “Dirty Lips” follows it on the album and is equally as good. “I can’t wait to kiss your dirty mouth.” The steel here is again at the forefront pinning down the lyrics winding over drunken antics about the bad girl he’s been kissing.

Some spectacular songwriting is rounded out with “The Cause & The Cure” as Chad brings it home singing about how he’ll save a girl even as he destroys her life with the lifestyle they are living. An achingly bitter love song that isn’t really a love song at all. It’s the kind of destructive love that sometimes you just can’t find your way out of.

There isn’t a song on It’s Crazy that I’d call weak, each deserves a listen to for what it is and another for how well they all fit into the album as a whole. I can not recommend this highly enough. I can already feel this album burning it’s way into my long run, becoming an album I just need to hear sometimes.

If you’re out west, check out their tour schedule and no matter where you are, get this album.

[I like this album as well, not as much as Cricket, but I think it's worth buying and not ripping off on Soulseek.—Mimi]

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