Richard Brook

Today’s DE question in the Back Room put me in a mood to rant about this. So rant, I will. There be spoilers in them there hills this post, and will assume that you’re caught up with the most recent episodes.

( Another Not-Review of something very few people on my watchlist care about )

This has been bothering me for a very long time, and I'd love for it to finally get explained. Even a Word of God explanation from jacksonpublick. Something! Anything!


Please?

I picked this one up yesterday on recommendation. It’s an older one, from 2003, but I’d never even heard of the band.

Cracker's sound is a twangy, alternative country sort, but in a good way. They seem to almost be taking the piss out of the country western genre, but in a way that reminds me more of Weird Al than David Allen Coe.

The album opens with Truckload of Art – an interesting piece of verbal imagery about a truck, which was full of art, that had overturned on the motorway. The style of the music and the rhythm of the lyrics contrast in an interesting sort of way that leaves you questioning just what sort of genre this band is trying to be. Next, is Duty Free; a track that seems to set into place the idea that this album is a storyteller, though not necessarily a continuous one. Each track has a different story to tell, and this is one of a traveller who can’t wait to go home. It has more of 90s pop rock feel – the sort that was labelled as “alternative” rock, despite the fact that everyone listened to that sort of music – than anything. Toward the middle, it breaks from the rhythmic pattern to form a more sort of open verse ramble. I almost get the feeling that they were trying to dabble with phonetic organisation in this one, but I’m not entirely sure.

The next track, Up Against the Wall Redneck Mothers, is a delightful piece of satire. If you just put this track on and hear it, it sounds like any other honky tonk, get-up-and-dance song you’d hear from a jukebox in a bar. But if you listen to it, it’s an entirely different beast. The story in this one is that of a typical Good Ol’ Boy who spends his time in bars and beating up hippies, and how people tend to take these as examples that his mum done raised him well. Or not.

Simaloa Cowboys follows, and is a ballad of two illegal immigrants from Mexico. The brothers come up to California, where they find work doing what the locals don’t want to do – picking fruit in an orchard. About halfway through, the story changes dramatically. They take a job that promises more money for less work – cooking meth in a tin shack. The song ends abruptly and leaves you with a feeling of slight confusion.

The next three tracks didn’t stand out to me at all. Family Tradition, which ironically breaks the cycle of storytellers on this album, is a song about breaking family tradition. While not explicitly stated, There does seem to be an underlying message of the singer (or character; it’s hard to tell) being disowned by his family for ostensibly becoming a sort of bubblegum redneck.

Bottle Let Me Down follows, and is quintessentially cowboy. It’s very slow and not a lot happened. It’s followed by Reasons to Quit, which is the shortest track on the album. It starts out with an interesting juxtaposition against the previous track, but suddenly takes an entirely different route all together. While it starts out lamenting about how giving up drink and drugs sounds like a good idea, on the surface, it’s just much more fun to get high. I can’t say that I particularly cared for this one at all.

The album picks back up again with Buenas Noches from a Lonely Room. It’s another storyteller, about a man who falls in love with a nameless woman in a red dress. It also has a surprise ending, when the distraught man follows the nameless woman while she’s with another guy, and shoots her in her sleep in a sort of “if I can’t have her, no one can” rage. This is another one that ends, leaving you feeling confused and a little lost, but in a good way.

The last track on this album was the first one I heard. Someone had linked to a really lame copy on YouTube during a conversation. The longest track on the album, it also stands out in every way. The country western twang is all but vanished from the music, and apart from the chorus, it definitely carries a feeling of having the words cobbled together because the make sense, and not because they adhere to a structure or pattern.

It tells the story about the last meeting with Virgin Records, the band’s label previous to this album. Only one of them is actually allowed into the building, while the other is forced to stand out in the blazing sun. While he’s sharing frozen treats with building staff, his buddy is busy being lost in the maze of a building, and accidentally finds himself in a room full of master tapes. He steals a few and eventually finds his way out. After that, the story turns into a long ramble about when Mr Redeye was stolen, and suggests that a member of the band was actually the thief. The whole song (well, the first half, anyway) seems to be a big “fuck you” to Virgin records, and leads out with a bunch of name dropping and calling.


Overall, the album is enjoyable, despite the middle falling a bit flat. I get the feeling that it’s not meant to be listened all the way through, or maybe to be heard in the background. Aside from those three tracks in the middle, it’s a very interesting and unique album. I don’t think that it’s something I’ll probably listen to regularly, but it does fit in nicely with the rest of my collection.