Son Volt
L.A. Weekly Review
I'd be inclined to consider Son Volt a midyear pick for best new band if it werent for the fact that, name aside, they arent all that new - lead Volter Jay Farrars been meshing pain-fueled garage rock and country melancholy for years in Uncle Tupelo. When a group breaks up, whats a guy to do but write a bunch of new songs and put together a backing band? And guess what? Son Volt sounds like the half of Tupelos final album, ANODYNE, that Farrar wrote and sang. Uncle tupelos blurred combination of punk, Neil Young and dust-bowl folk made them more than just another Gram Parsons disciple, and so is Son Volt.
TRACE begins with "Windfall," an acoustic strummer about a late-night drive for a troubled soul. "Both feet on the floor, two hands on the wheel, may the wind take your troubles away," sings Farrar in a voice that has never been more achingly beautiful.. And so is the song. What follows is a slow and steady mix of tunes that are both tough and gentle. "Drown" and "Catching On," for example, crunch and smolder with electric guitars and muscular backbeats. Others glide and weep, like "Windfall," with acoustics, fiddles and steel guitars. The songs are less stories than smatterings of heartland images seem to come pouring from his characters minds. There are steel highways and billboard signs, main streets and levees, all of which serve as a backdrop for souls always in transition, always in search of something better.
Some will declare the gloom that hovers over TRACE to be too much of a downer. Its true that Farrar and his characters always sound ready to cash in, never more so than in dirgelike "Ten Second News." Here, we see "a beach there known for cancer, waiting to happen." Then, though, Farrar assures, "Bright eyes dont change, stay the same, there must be an answer to what keeps is going on." And, in "Windfall," the character who is on a "trail spent with fear" catches that flash of faith as Farrar, the guardian angel, sings, "Try to make it far enough to the next time zone, few and far between past the midnight hour, youll never be alone, youre really not alone." Glimmers of hope like these are what give TRACE its ultimate catharsis.
--Neal Weiss
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