Son Volt and The Search

Son Volt's The Search was released a couple weeks ago and I've been meaning to write something about it but haven't really been in the frame of mind to do so until now.

The album sees this, the second incarnation of the band, move further away from the ragged alt-country strains that Farrar pioneered with Uncle Tupelo and Son Volt Mk I. This line-up debuted in 2005 with Okemah and the Melody of Riot. With Brad Rice's lead guitar work and the more propulsive rhythm section of Andrew Duplantis and Dave Bryson, the album was a heavier affair than anything produced by the previous incarnation of the band. For The Search, Derry deBorja was brought in from the touring band to contribute keys. This, along with Farrar's continued exploration of the piano, stretches the band's sound and helps make it fuller. The new sounds and textures tweak the Son Volt formula but never overshadow the guitar.

For too many folks, the band's first album, Trace, serves as a formula they'd like to see repeated. Long gone are the uplifting fiddle of "Windfall" and the lilting banjo on "Tear-Stained Eye". Today the band has a more muscular sound with washes of keyboards and Farrar's lyrics have become more opaque, a trend started on the band's third album, Wide Swing Tremelo. Still, the pedal steel of long-time Son Volt collaborator Eric Heywood is present on two tracks and these songs hark back to the band's first three albums.

I've read recent criticism of Jay Farrar's voice and it's quite true that he has a limited vocal range. But his plaintive baritone can emote much more than countless others with a much broader palette of octaves. Farrar has a rather simple style of singing that's always had more than a hint of resignation to it which suits his songs perfectly. It's difficult to imagine what someone with the voice of an opera star could lend to Farrar's songs which peer out through a windshield on Highway 61 and look at Middle America. Bob Dylan's limited vocal range never stopped him from revolutionizing rock music. Plus Alan Lomax's field recordings contain countless performances by folks who don't have the most adroit voices. It's not how many notes you can hit, it's what you do with the notes that counts.

While former bandmate Jeff Tweedy has become a darling of the indie rock crowd since the collapse of Uncle Tupelo for Wilco's constantly evolving style (and battle with the evil record companies), Jay Farrar hasn't stood still. Although both have moved further afield from their alt-country roots, Farrar alone seems eager to build upon those roots and twist them by experimenting in a solo context and then returning to the band to really mix things up. However, this may not be readily apparent with The Search's lead track, "Slow Hearse". A lilting piano melody, light brush work, and bass keep things rather muted at first but the song builds as Farrar repeats "Feels like driving around in slow hearse". Mellotron strings bubble in the background as a 12-string guitar joins in as well as some backwards guitar parts which could have come from "Tomorrow Never Knows". The keys and backwards guitar loops are far-removed from alt-country but the 12-string is a reminder of The Byrds. And, quite frankly, I love how the song marches forward with sounds piling on sounds until it slowly winds down to a stop. It might be easy to dismiss the song as throwaway but it's the overture of the album, in a way. It gives us a taste of the new sounds being introduced and that piano march returns as well. And, presumably, the rest of the album will tell how what it feels like to be driving around in a slow hearse.

The album's lead single, "The Picture", follows. With a sprightly horn arrangement, it's a million miles away from the preceding song. It's a catchy tune that's "Medicine Hat" 9 years later. The upbeat demeanor of the music stands in contrast to lyrics such as "When war is profit and profit is war" and "We'll know when we get there/If we'll find mercy". "Action" reminded me of "Right On Through" from Wide Swing Tremelo but with more balls and a guitar sound lifted from Led Zeppelin's "Ten Years Gone". This latest version of Son Volt adds more punch to their songs both with Dave Bryson's drumming and Brad Rice's guitar but, unlike a reviewer recently opined, the band does not try to emulate grunge.

Derry deBorja is now a full-time member of the group and his keyboards come to the fore in "Underground Dream". The string sound of "Slow Hearse" returns here in a prominent role as does the 12-string guitar. "Circadian Rhythm" opens with acoustic guitar but organ and some electric guitar ala Neil Young in "Like a Hurricane" soon join in. Oh, and there's more backwards guitar. The song weighs in at just over 5-minutes and, while Bryson opens his hi-hat and gets down a bit towards the end, it's a slow burn with surreal lines like "Thoughts for the plane with brown eyes waiting/Guitar callous whirlwind belief gets made".

"Beacon Soul" is a weak spot here. Not a bad song, by any means, but Farrar's singing always seems to be trying to catch up during the verses and it's only when Bryson slows the pace with rim shots does he get there. The title track makes up for this in spades. It chugs along in classic Son Volt style with a melodic guitar riff. Farrar's phrasing here is more concise and the fantastic chorus is bolstered by minimal but effective organ work. The song closes with a rousing guitar solo that is perhaps less melodic than one would expect but the straining notes keep pace with Bryson's frantic beating of his floor toms.

"Adrenaline and Heresy" slows things down with just some piano and Farrar's forlorn words dragging back the narrator of "Steal the Crumbs" from Farrar's days with Uncle Tupelo. The lyrics turn from oblique social observation to a love story: "She said I still love you/I don't know if I want to spend the/rest of my time with you". A martial drum beat takes the song away from Anodyne territory towards what is probably the first thing remotely resembling a happy ending in Farrar's catalogue. I find myself unsure what to make of the tempo change and Farrar intoning: "High on adrenaline/It's a new day". Did it turn out OK or was she out the door? With the pounding drums and repetitive piano & guitar flourishes, the ending sounds like Krautrock. The first time I heard it, I immediately thought of Faust's "It's a Rainy Day, Sunshine Girl".

"Satellite" is another rocker like "Action", and they both sound like they would have fit nicely on Wide Swing Tremelo. But they exemplify the new Son Volt sound with the more muscular rhythm section and the addition of organ which adds to the sonic palette. "Automatic Society", which follows, fits into the vein as well, but is a bit, well, grungier, with some good slide work. "Methamphetamine" is the first song to feature Eric Heywood and his pedal steel. It sort of lumbers along like "Left a Slide" or "Barstow" and tells covers familiar lyrical ground for Farrar with its images of working class life and broken dreams. The chorus is bursting with rueful longing and stands among Farrar's best. Every Son Volt album has had one song which stands out immediately on first listen as being just blatantly catchy. Trace had "Windfall" and Okemah had "Afterglow 61". The Search has "Methamphetamine".

The piano breaks in "L Train" are all-too short to lift it above being an average mid-tempo rocker. "Highways and Cigarettes" sees Heywood return and features Shannon McNally in close harmony which makes this a companion to "Barstow".

"Phosphate Skin" closes out the album and begins with another backwards guitar loop which gives way to Farrar's acoustic guitar and voice. If you don't listen to the vocals, one might swear it's a dirge. But the lyrics tell you that "It can only get better".

Having read several other reviews of The Search, it seems that response to the album largely fall along the lines of age. Reviewers writing for an older audience, say, The New York Times, praise the album and commonly refer to it as a "mature" work. The music is an expansion of Farrar's previous efforts both within the confines of Son Volt and solo while the lyrics are a treat to decode. On the flipside,
websites and publications directed at a generally younger audience find Farrar's lyrics embarrassing and the music lacking. Many of these reviewers note the failure of Farrar to live up to the promise of Trace and essentially say it's been all downhill since 1995. It is the lyrics that come in for a real drudging here, even to the point of all but ignoring the music and this is a real shame. Farrar has always had the keenest ear for melody and nothing has changed in that department. No matter how many washes of keyboards or backwards guitar loops there are, there's always a good, if not great, melody underneath that is being colored and to ignore this is irresponsible. Here the band combine Farrar's tunefulness with his inclination towards a diversity of sounds in a way that allows the two to meld perfectly rather than leaving the latter to be short sonic experiments as was the case on his solo albums.

On the lyric side, the third shift barstool fatalism of Farrar's lyrics with Uncle Tupelo was replaced by a more impressionistic view of Middle America in the first version of Son Volt. Starting with his first solo effort, Sebastopol, in 2001 and continuing up to the album at hand, he's taken a larger view of things. Instead of portraying restless youth at a dead-end job assuaging the pain with the bottle, he documents an automatic society with "planned obsolescence manufactured senselessness" where "special offer only facelift society's soul". Farrar has always had one foot in the past and one in the present. Uncle Tupelo's first album had the punk energy of "Before I Break" right next to a Carter Family cover. When I first listened to "Automatic Society" and thought about it, the traditional song "Peg and Awl" came to mind. It's not that the two songs have much of anything in common musically and the lyrics are very different. However, they both address a change in the winds, so to speak. One is about the effects of the Industrial Revolution while the other is about modern consumerism but each has someone looking at the world around himself and not liking what he sees. The lyrics here are certainly less-direct than in the past but this also makes them more evocative. Perhaps Farrar is just taking a page from the Jon Anderson book of lyric writing. There are times when I listened to the album and felt like a word or phrase was inserted because it fit the melody and/or evoked the right image as opposed to being the most direct way to express something. But for every verse with a line like "Wordsmiths and paintgangs 21st century/All mixed up in modern cacophony", there's a chorus with a simpler message such as "Always dreaming it's the search not the find/The door is open to change your mind". If this style of filtering Herbert Marcuse through Bob Dylan in a less than mercurial way doesn't suit you, so be it.

I take it as a good sign that, at the age of 40, Jay Farrar isn't content to merely tread old ground and try to recreate Trace. His acoustic leanings are still very much alive in Gob Iron, a project with Anders Parker which finds Farrar in Woody Guthrie mode. This, along with his solo albums, means that he is no longer defined by Son Volt. The band is now another place for him to stretch out and do something different. The folksy, alt-country core is still in there but it's now a springboard for investigating other paths. People who lament the fictional notion that the band has never been able to build upon Trace need to get over it.