Day 34: Yonder Mountain String Band – Elevation

Bluegrass isn’t really my thing at all. I can get into it, but it takes some effort. It’s not something I can just relax and enjoy; I have to kind of lean forward in my chair and squint and whatnot to really tune into it at all. Actually I’m being a little kind; I kind of hate it and have a hard time taking it seriously. But it’s the kind of knee-jerk hate that’s based on only having heard a collective maybe 15 minutes of bluegrass music in my life, so it’s the kind of thing I’m here to get rid of in the first place.

Eight hours of continuous listening later, I had to open up their reviews on Amazon to find out whether these guys were serious or not. Turns out they were, and Yonder Mountain is even a couple peoples’ favorite band. I wouldn’t have known.

Here comes the part where I stop being negative for a minute. From a technical standpoint they’re pretty fucking impressive. “Mental Breakdown” is just shy of three minutes of frenetic shredding, each instrument taking a solo turn. It’s genuinely fun stuff.

There are what sounds like three singers, and they take turns singing lead on songs. I’m guessing they write the lyrics for the songs they take, because each one is different. The tracks are evenly split between story songs about no-good ramblin’ men living life on the run (“The Bolton Stretch”, “On The Run”), several junior-high love songs (“Once I had a sweetheart and our love was fair/I remember her brown eyes and her long, dark hair/I remember summer nights down at the fishin’ hole/Rollin’ around in the tall grass and the sweet lies we told“). The best song to me ends up being ballad “Eight Cylinders”, where they rein in their chops and let the music (and the listener) breathe.

The vocals are a strong point. They harmonize extremely well, running through roller-coaster scales in lockstep, sounding flawless. Best of all, their tones just mix well. Unfortunately, the singer who does “40 Miles From Denver” (and a couple others) has a really unpleasant voice. As a harmonizing instrument it sounds perfect, but out front, singing lead, it’s nasal and strained beyond its capability all the time. The only other problem is that every song rehashes the same lyrical themes and the same verse-big harmony chorus-instrumental breakdown formula, and the album falters because most of the tracks end up feeling indistinguishable.

In my brief research I frequently saw String Cheese Incident mentioned in the same sentence as Yonder Mountain. I’m not surprised. This is jammy stuff. When they spent 3 minutes of a 5 minute song noodling on the banjo, I got the impression that was them trying to tune it down. That’s my biggest complaint here. I’m not sure who this is for. That’s why I was wondering whether these guys were serious. Their constant soloing doesn’t really serve the songs. Sometimes music like this just comes across as an excuse for some really talented musicians to have fun challenging themselves, and sometimes they put on a hell of a show. Maybe they’d be different live, but on the record I don’t really feel like they gave me anything at all.

Day 23: Alan Jackson – Good Time

“Alan Jackson is pretty well untouchable in Country circles,” a friend told me. I can see why: there’s an apparent craftsmanship to this album that is absolutely assured of its infallibility. Over the course of 17 tracks that pretty much sound the way someone who doesn’t listen to country music would expect country songs to sound, he comes across as someone who knows exactly what he’s doing, and he leaves whether that is a good thing or a bad thing entirely to the listener.

Brandishing cultural references to strike for a connection with the listener can be a risky gambit. It all depends on your audience. For instance, when Vampire Weekend sings “Walk to class / In front of ya / Spilled kefir / On your keffiyeh,” the listener gets to have a personal moment as they inevitably remember having a crush on a girl who wore a keffiyeh everywhere, which probably every man I know has at some point, seeing as how keffiyehs became standard-issue hot chick garb somewhere along the line. Or maybe they never did. Maybe they like chicks who wear wicker cowboy hats and automatically assume that broads who wear those ay-rab scarves are probably stuck up bitches. Maybe you’re like me and hear a song like “Country Boy” and feel like throwing up in your own lap. “Country Boy” is an example of what made it impossible for me to care about anything that was happening to my ears while this album was playing. It, like half the album, consists of rattlin’ off aww-shucks references like:

Bucket seats, soft as baby’s new butt,
Lockin’ hubs, that’ll take you through a deep rut

and later, on “1976”:

Eight track tapes were still in style and Elvis was still alive,
Wonder Woman sure looked fine, Bionic Man was still Prime Time,
And that girl I liked, we kept on tryin till we got it right

A lot of the album continues this way, scattering references to things that people who would like this album would probably appreciate quite a bit. The end result though was that while I was at least able to connect with the things Josh Turner was pining for — as he painted a picture with broader strokes, the kind of pastoral joys (family, love) that all reasonable men want to remember on their deathbeds, I think — Alan Jackson instead dips his pen into such specific wells that it strikes me as someone trying to either prove that they are in touch with the curve (as in “I Still Like Bologna”‘s aww-shucks bemusement with 50 inch plasmas that “seem to reach out and grab ya”) or to easily remind the listener of a time he’d been through, that maybe the listener has been through or maybe the listener wishes he was.

The album, as I said, ends up being pretty mixed. Half of the tracks are nice, straightforward songs about things any red-blooded man ends up thinking about: falling in love; remembering falling in love; trying to not be bored with fucking the girl he fell in love with and married all those years ago, even though he sure does still love her. I think he mentioned his kids in there somewhere, and I’m pretty positive that one of the songs is lamenting the death of a loved one.

The music on this album is actually quite good, but it suffers by association with the lyrics. Jackson has had the same backup band for quite a few years now, and they demonstrate a comfort together. The band is strong on everything from the album’s plenitude of ballads to its chin-jutting bluegrass tunes, and the music manages to apologize for the lyrics quite well most of the time. The album ends up being at its strongest when it lets feeling through, and stops trying to use objects and names as placeholders.

There are plenty such moments where Jackson is universal and relatable, even a complex, likeable man. When he stops trying feebly to paint a word picture, and settles for just telling you about feelings, the album takes off — if only for moments at a time. The album’s high point, for me, ends up being “If You Want to Make Me Happy“: “If you wanna make me happy / Pour me some bourbon on the rocks / And play every sad song on the jukebox.” He actually convinced me that we could sit down to a drink together and have an alright time.