Amoeba Music

Comments: Digipak.

Review
Son Volt’s first record for the Rounder label was marketed as a return to the band’s seminal high-water mark, 1995’s Trace. But it’s more accurate to say these dozen songs split the difference between Trace’s country cuts (eschewing its urgent rockers) and the down-tempo rockers on its follow-up, 1997’s Straightaways. There are instrumental and songwriting clues all over ACD – not to mention a narrative device Trace was built around: the Mississippi -- that shows bandleader Jay Farrar is looking reflectively at previous models (he’s said as much in interviews). Like Trace and Straightaways (and most Farrar songs, frankly) ACD is soaked in desperation, and Farrar uses historical incidents – fires, floods and toxic spills back then; riverboat tragedies, Katrina, and industrial decay now – as launching points for his songs.

But on Trace, Farrar used those incidents and the time he spent commuting the Big Muddy from New Orleans to Minneapolis (where previous Son Volt band-mates Dave and Jim Boquist lived) to make blunt existential connections that transcended the events themselves. The river’s timeless power contrasting with the brief, misguided reign of men. Now, though, Farrar is married and a father, and because out-on-the-ledge desperation is mostly the prerogative of the young and unattached, his music has shifted, subtly but inexorably, into a more easy-going gait -- and it was Trace’s immediacy that got lost in the transition. That doesn’t exactly make Farrar’s output since then Dad Rock – unless your Dad’s a former punk-twang hero with a left-of-center-populist streak and a history Jones who pens classic old school country nearly as strong as the legends he reveres. On ACD, Farrar turns in a handful of the acoustic country anti-ballads that he explored to such great effect on Trace – the shuffling “Roll On” includes the prototypical Farrar aphorism “The stones we throw always find us on the way down,” the vintage pedal steel-and-fiddle two-step of “Dust of Daylight” may be the best country ditty he’s written since “Windfall” (though without quite as catchy a chorus), and the slow country blues of “Pushed Too Far” sounds like a lost George Jones 70s’ cut. Farrar sprinkles keys in to give these tracks a slightly updated spin, and the Cajun-accordion in “Dynamite” – as close as Farrar gets to a love song (“this love is like celebrating the Fourth of July with dynamite”) – is an especially effective new twist.

There’s still plenty of fear about the future, too, as Farrar's dystopian view about the wheel of history remains intact – check the dark, Cormac McCarthy-meets-James Kunstler scenario regarding the coming fuel shortage on the chugging, coal-burner blues, “When the Wheels Don’t Roll.” (The song was written in the summer of 2008, when gas prices soared.) The angst is still there, in other words, but tempered with glimmers of hope, as on “Exiles,” when he sings: “History repeats while the sick machine roars/Hustlers and wolves walk freely through the door/But when you go leave a smile on your face/We’re exiles now pulling out of this place.” The road, as always, gives us pause and hope, however fleeting and transitory.

On the downside, Farrar’s songs still sometimes read like the CNN news-ticker, a blur of bad-news headlines whose sheer weight invites lethargy, and the occasional line of humanizing context doesn’t always do enough to personalize the music. Farrar said he wanted ACD to revert to simpler themes and sounds, and for the most part it has though he still delivers the occasional awkward couplet. On Trace especially, Farrar used the rockers’ urgent rush and road-weary twang to make every clich