01.22.08

High time for lowlifes: One more River to Drag

Posted in some albums we done liked others we ain't, cricket spazzes, drag the river - January 22nd, 2008 at 10:46 pm by Cricket

Once upon a time I was much younger Cricket and I listened to punk rock and the alternative music of the day (which was more alternative than the stuff these kids today are making). Eventually I expanded out into alt-country and, by extension of that old country, Americana and roots music. One day my pal, Ethel Cannes, dropped Lucero in my lap and it was like everything came together. Punk rock and country music written like someone was reading my own heart. There must be more, I thought, and went a-searchin’.

I don’t know how I found it, though it feels like maybe I tripped over it in a dark alley as I was leaving a bar after too much whiskey, but there it was: Drag the River. If someone was making music just specifically, exactly, only for me it would be Drag the River. And there was much rejoicing when I finally came to hear them. And lo, there were past albums to revel in. And so I did. And then they broke up. And I cried. And cried. And cried. But wait, there is another album, coming soon to save all our souls. It’s You Can’t Live This Way, and I have it in my hot little hands, for my own salvation and yours too (assuming your salvation hinges on my actually starting to post here on HCT again, the album has granted it, eh?).

It is more than just a new album from my favorite band, it’s a last album. A parting shot and one sent right through my heart exactly when I needed it most. See I was recently broken up with and when you break up you need something specific to listen to. In this case, Bob Dylan was right out. Lucero and The New Tragedies were too sad and already too close to my heart and then, suddenly, there was DTR! The best part is I’m enough past breaking up to not have my sadness associated with this album, which, while gruesomely sad, just makes me so fucking happy it’s almost like the album itself is my new boyfriend.

This record is so good I’m tempted to start rattling off some pretentious bullshit about authorial intent and what these songs mean, but really the only thing I can reasonably do is what I always do: tell you what the songs mean to me in the most overblown way possible. Let’s not kid ourselves, this isn’t going to be a reasoned, rational discussion of the merits of each song, of the musical contribution to society. [Indeed, judging by the amount of typos I corrected, I would not be surprised if half of this review was written by Cricket jumping up and down on her keyboard in excitement.—Daisy] I’ll just say for the sake of reviewing, if you liked the past DTR albums, you’ll like this one. If you haven’t heard DTR and you like Lucero or other albums I’ve reviewed for lyrical content and emotional meaning and good, rough, not over-produced music, then you will like this. [Let the spazzing begin!—Daisy] And so without any useful or critical information, I give you my own take on each song:

You Can’t Live This Way opens with “The Death of the Life of the Party.” On my first listening, this song struck me as an anthem of sorts. Tommy Womack once spoke in these pages about how his “Cockroach After the Bomb” was a personal bit about growing older and surviving, but how after 9-11, it became something everyone related to. “The Death of the Life of the Party” has that for me. It could be about an actual someone’s death, it could be about a specific party, it could be about how the good times always seem to end, whether it’s old age setting in or just how things seems to change, it could be about the band breaking up. It doesn’t matter, it resonates, utterly, on so many levels for me.

“Rangement” follows. I’ve heard a couple versions of this song and musically this is by far my favorite because of the crazy jazz horn break in the middle. The song itself is nearly perfect in that it sounds like maybe a break-up song, or a love that could be or never was, or just a song, you know, about a thing, that like might or might not become a thing.

There is such a strangely resigned sadness in “Brookfield.” If I listen to this song with my eyes closed I see run-down clapboard houses on the side of a dusty road and rough old honky-tonks populated by hardworking, dead end guys who don’t do much but work and drink until they die. Happiness isn’t something that’s ever addressed. There’s a sense of being stuck, one way or another that pervades the whole song, but there’s not really misery tied to it, so much as a sort of wistful melancholy.

“If forgetting is forgiving/I have given/Giving into new things every day.” (I’m just taking a wild stab at transcribing lyrics here.) “Fleeting Porch of Tide” is a grey day of a song, where the sun cracks, bright, gold, just for a second between the clouds, right before it sets. It’s the point after you break up when you can’t be sad any more, being angry is too hard and you are just trying to forget so you don’t have to think about it anymore and can just move on. The song itself is almost a celebration of the grey in-between, when you recognize that all relationships seem to ebb and flow away and have beginnings and ends. That one bit of clarity on the cycle you have before you start it all over again. Or perhaps I making way too personal of a reading here? [Well, if nothing else, you’re bumming the hell out of me.—Daisy] Naw, I’m gonna say not possible, since music isn’t anything for me if I can’t make it ridiculously personal. Also the accordion here is so excellent as to make nearly pee from joy.

I’ve hit the point where I have to make myself write about the album. I start wanting to just quote all the lyrics and go, “See!? Look how great!” But I won’t. I am strong. I can resist. “W. W. Too” hit a point in the album for me where I start to succumb to the desolate sadness that is a DTR album. I start out excited just to be listening to DTR that I can make even the saddest thing joyful. Up to a point. The lines, “Would you give up all hope/dig your grave and rest your bones,” might be what sent me over. Or perhaps the very western, clicky cowboy drums and guitar strumming on this song. It’s got a campfire and boiled coffee, out on the plains sadness to it.

The grim tone picks up in “Tobacco Fields,” or at least there’s some small joy, the feeling of mud between the toes, even when the rain never seems to end. I’m actually quite mesmerized by the low, twisty guitar on this one. It’s simple and sets a beautiful tone for this song. Like so many of the songs here, there’s too much time passed, too much to remember and things we’ve just set aside because of the pain associated with them.

“Defy the Moon” has the deep, heartache of twang I’ve always associated with DTR. The song rocks steadily along, but the underpinning of it is a very country, nearly Hawaiian bit of steel. Though here it doesn’t follow the country music honkytonk twang standard, rather it’s more evocative, more interesting and more deeply tied to the song itself. The lyrics here have the usual DTR excellence, but I find myself closing my eyes and listening to the second story from the steel player.

On “Caleb’s Grave” the juxtaposition of the chorus the lyric “I haven’t been this scared in a life time/roses die on the bloodline/down in Caleb’s Grave you’re haunted for life,” is switched out for “I haven’t slept this sound in a life time/roses thrive on the blood line/down in Caleb’s Grave you’re haunted for life,” just pierces me. There’s an overtone of death to the entire record. I can’t say if I’m perceiving it more because I know this is the last DTR album, the death of something, or if over all it is that much darker than the previous very black albums.

The quality of the music behind the dark lyrics is, obviously, 50% of what makes DTR so great. “Lying in the Feel” is like a love note to that notion of mine. It’s subtle, but it rises and falls with the emotions of the song. There’s gentle, almost soothing guitar leading in, that picks up and starts to pull apart and twang a little. The drums kick in with bells (tambourine?) and the guitar comes even more forward as the song goes on. I can feel myself rising and falling with the song, each note part of the storytelling here.

So, here it is, in “Lost Angel Saloon,” the definitive line for the album, “But memories hurt/so you drink ’til they don’t/let me be the first to welcome you to the Lost Angel Saloon.” And there it is. A song about the desolate, bad choices people make that send folks along dark paths, beauty dying and ending up in dead end places. It carries that one line that covers so much of how the whole album makes me feel. That time when there’s so much pain from one thing, from every thing, that you keep pushing on, towards something or nothing, just to forget and when that doesn’t drink, our characters end up lost and lonely in dark bars way out west. It’s part of what makes this such perfect, if completely non-mainstream, country music. The keys and the steel in this song play together in particularly spectacular way. Putting the beauty back in an otherwise irredeemably bleak song.

“Br00tal” rocks a little harder than the other songs. Or maybe it sounds more electric to me. It’s fuzzy and perfect and I’m nearly dying to hear it live, rock to it while drinking cold beer and chilling with my friends. This almost a recommendation against lost lonely lives, that same hopeless feeling of lost love and lives that go on to something better.

Titled perfectly, because “Pre-Post Party” is like there, grooving, growing and then just gone. Twenty seconds. It could be a hundred times longer and still not enough for me.

I can never choose a favorite, they aren’t my children, but it’s like choosing between them, but “Lizzy” is high on my list. “I’m the kinda man your momma hates/I wouldn’t blame you if you did too/If you think I wrote this song for you/You’d be wrong.” It’s a little louder, a little angrier, a little more than the other songs. It fits well, the album is quite cohesive, but here maybe I relate a little more.

For close out to what is essentially a posthumous album for an excellent band, “Bad Side of a Good Time” couldn’t be more perfect. It picks up, the keyboards making it a little, dare I say, jauntier. So we can all tap our toes cheerfully along even as the lyrics tie the ending right up. This song carries the thread of lost, directionless lives, ignored warnings and endings. Like so many of the songs here it could be about anything your heart puts into it, break-ups (bands or relationships), death, bad choices, it all works.

At the end of each DTR album there’s a track that is a single track containing all the songs from the album, I assume all alternate takes. Sometimes I can clearly pin down the difference between the two versions—like “Rangement” lacks the surprising Mexican horns. I love this long track so much. It’s like they I knew I wouldn’t be able to wait to listen all over again and so it’s all just right there, just different enough, just the same enough to make me really pay attention.

I’m pretty much in denial about this being the end of Drag the River. You Can’t Live This Way is really the most mature DTR effort to date. The others are of course superb, but there’s a quality to the music here that makes me wish for even more, to see where the band would go. I don’t know if the repeated theme of endings and death in the songs are because the band knew it was all over or just they way the bottles fell. Whatever it was, it is a perfect send off to an amazing band.

You can get your own copy of You Can’t Live This Way at Suburban Home. If you haven’t already, go poke around the boys’ website, their MySpace and the DTR messageboards.

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