Amoeba Music

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Review
While many in the navel-gazing rock world are just catching on to the popular frustration with political and cultural trends since the turn of the new century, Son Volt’s Jay Farrar has been asking pointed questions and seeking honest answers for almost two decades now – never more so than on The Search. Over the years, Farrar has amassed a catalog of incisive, country rock-flavored social commentary, both as a solo artist and with Uncle Tupelo and Son Volt. He takes his musical cues from far-sighted cultural observers ranging from Woody Guthrie and Bruce Springsteen to the Beatles and Black Flag, but his songs are pure heartland fare/born of his Midwest upbringing in a depressed industrial town (Belleville, IL.), as well as decades spent seeing the country from touring van windows and cheap hotel rooms. Here, Farrar sees a nation that’s totally plugged in but increasingly tuned out and alienated, and the “modern cacophony” makes him fearful for our future. Tangible urgency fuels The Search, Farrar’s lyrics running through the songs like a 24/7 satellite news-ticker highlighting gasoline junkies, terror threats, eroding liberties, methamphetamine scourges, fast food wastelands, stem-cell research wars, televangelists, immigration, and bad air indexes. But this isn’t a nihilistic screed; hope rides along like a passenger on Farrar’s journey, and you can hear it in the music. The Search is the best synthesis yet of Farrar’s more experimental solo side and the basic Son Volt formula – backwards, Revolver-esque guitar loops and mellotron swirls, Eastern accents and Memphis soul blended with solid rock and old-school country. But that hope is best expressed in Farrar’s vision, which transcends simplistic doctrinaire answers. Rather, as he sings on “The Picture” over joyous blasts of Memphis horns, “We’ll know when we get there/if we find mercy.”
-John Schacht