Tokyo Fan wrote:So I guess I did make it past the title. An editor didn't catch this, eh?
yo, the "examiner" doesn't have editors
it's a so-called "community journalism" site where anybody can post anything they want and they get paid by the hit ... the "payment" is apparently a microscopic amount (less than a penny per hit) and hits don't count unless the reader spends a certain amount of time on the site ...
Yet more Farrar/Tweedy comparisons, but I like the last three paragraphs... pretty much sums up how I see the differences:
"Let Wilco play with dissonance and smuggle out insight in riddles (what the hell are spiders doing filling out tax returns?), and let Son Volt celebrate the Old, Weird America with three chords and the truth."
The band's sixth album finds them for the first time on an indie label. That it's a label known for roots music makes it a good match for most of these 12 new songs. There's a back-to-basics feel on the mid-tempo country rockers (No Turning Back), the slow beauties with mournful lap steel (Pushed Too Far) and even on the musically warm, more upbeat, almost Tex-Mex opening song Dynamite. All of them, in fact, are as melodic as anything on Son Volt's 1995 debut Trace. Jay Farrar's lyrics sung in that lugubrious voice (which only starts grating on the piano-led doomfest Sultana), drift seamlessly in and out of old folk-Americana and modern-day Americana, from John Barleycorn to the interior of a small car; from maritime disasters to broken hearts; from levees breaking to, er, more levees breaking. Best of all is Cocaine & Ashes-piano, keyboards, lovely harmonies- inspired by Keith Richards snorting his dad.
Damning it with faint praise, Uncut's measly review of the album.
Uncle Tupelo's Jay Farrar’s recent work with Son Volt, the band he revived with a new lineup in 2005, seems preoccupied with disappearing worlds and the loss of arcane traditions. It’s a feeling deepened on American Central Dust, in which he takes stock of the global banking fiasco to give things a more piquant air of wistfulness.
The songs themselves are thoughtful, ambling between folk, country and mid-paced roots-rock. More roughed-up stuff like “When The Wheels Don’t Move” might have served better, but there’s light (sideways Keith Richards tribute “Cocaine And Ashes”) and dark (“Sultana”) in equal, engaging measure.
“On the surface there might be this perception that we don’t have a lot in common, but once we got in the studio together we found out we do,” Farrar said of Gibbard.
“We can both quote the drunken speech John Wayne gave to ROTC cadets during the Vietnam War.”