Customer Reviews

Songs of Drinking & Rebellion

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

The album begins with the pretty rock ballad of Brewster Station and ends with the lullaby of Brighter Than the Day. In between are fun near-pop songs and the most sweetly sophisticated Halfshirt which grows from ballad into a grunge guitar jam ala Smashing Pumpkins.

I caught these guys and gal in some backwoods bar in Birmigham a year or 2 back. One song after another just blew me away and this cd along with Seat Beneath captures the experinces w/o sounding watered down like most of the crap out there. Not too sure where they are now, but dammit if I don't find myself singing one of their tunes in my head almost every day!!

This album is less polished than their later work, "A Seat Beneath the Chairs," but its raw quality is great if you're tired of over-produced pop rubbish. The best songs on this album are "Ready OK," "Brewster Station," and "Excuse Me While I Drink Myself...."

This album reminds me of a rainy day in north Jersey, possibly in the autumn. They stick to the traditional rock band setup of guitars, drum, and bass. The production is sometimes inconsistent, with vocals almost drowned out by guitars in "West" and a few other songs. While I give this album 4 stars, I don't consider it as good as "A Seat Beneath the Chairs" because the production on this album isn't quite as good.

On first listen, Spent shares some of the melodic sense of fellow New Jerseyans Yo La Tengo. It's 1994, not the year punk broke but definitely the year that it broke my heart. fIREHOSE had called it quits, Laura and Mac from Superchunk had split, and my high school sweetheart and I had parted for the final time. My roommates wanted to listen to Dylan and The Band, I wanted to listen to Fudge Tunnel and The Jesus Lizard. These were trying times, and I needed a record like Songs of Drinking and Rebellion to pull me through.

Succinctly capturing my mood, "Excuse Me While I Drink Myself To Death" is a great example of the songwriting going on on this album, cutting yet euphonic. This is a band with several secret weapons, but most noteworthy for me is Annie Hayden, whose clear guitar lines and angular chords are further augmented by her occasional piano playing and truly lovely indie rock voice. Fellow singers Joe Weston and John King add equal measures of fellow indie-rockers like Ira Kaplan's and Calvin Johnson's vocal stylings to the recipe, along with notes of oak and overtones of wild plum and clover honey.

The songs are by turns clear ringing indie rock and gnarled, knotty guitars. Never has a triple-guitar band sounded so clear, clean, and wide open. It's an excellent document of where indie rock was headed in 1994. This sound would eventually find it's peak elsewhere, with other artists, but Songs Of Drinking And Rebellion is a testament to the excellent work being done in relative obscurity a decade and a half ago.

Unfortunately, it would be many years after 1994 before I would finally get to hear this whole album. I ended up pulling myself through, learning to love and appreciate "Music From Big Pink" and "Desire" in the process. Oh well, that's how things work sometimes. But SODAR is not just a time capsule backwards to those angsty 20-something years preceding my rebirth of perspective. Songs like "Brighter Than Day," "Santa Claus To The Rescue" and "Open Wide" are jangly and harmonic, "Landscaper" burns just a little, and the whole package manages that strong-yet-delicate dichotomy with ease and charm. Charm alone wouldn't be enough though -- there are many "wish I'd seen THAT live" moments too. If you're enjoying bands like The Rosebuds these days, this great debut from Spent will appeal to you. It's mixed like an album from '94 -- if recorded today it would be bigger, more compressed -- but this certainly reflects the tastes and recording budget of an underground band fifteen years ago and is just one more indication of this record's sincerity.

There will be a mild hangover from listening to this album. But never fear, just put the headphones back on and press Play.