Customer Reviews

Trace

5 star:		(64)
4 star:		(8)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

From the ashes of Uncle Tupelo we've been blessed with Son Volt! This is one of the best Americana albums I've ever heard. I always preferred the Jay Farrar-penned Uncle Tupelo songs, so Trace is a slice of alt/country heaven. Trace is also easily the best of the three Son Volt releases.

My favorite song here is the melancholy Tear-Stained Eye...beautiful! Steve Earle fans might recognize the opening track, Windfall. He was covering it every night on the El Corazon tour. Fararrar wrote every song on Trace except for Mystifies Me, which was written by Ron Wood(Rolling Stones/Faces). There really isn't a weak song on Trace. It is a seamless trip through loud distortion, pedal steels, and heartache ballads. Jay Farrar is my generation's Neil Young...and this is the best thing he's been involved with since Tupelo's No Depression.

If you dig Green On Red, Neil Young, the spirit of Townes Van Zandt, Steve Earle or intelligent, emotional masterpieces in general...then you need look no further. Trace is a twilight ride in cool weather with the windows down. It's the musical equivalent of I-10.

This album was quite a bit Left-field for me when I got it. I dug Johnny Cash a little bit, and some of the old school country dudes, but I was essentially an indie rock/ avante garde jazz kinda guy. But Trace rocked me. I would listen to it on rainy days commuting to school in my car, because it just felt so right. It became very private music for me, as I didn't want my friends knowing I was into something so "country". But I eventually began to see how this music was far more honestly populist than Rage Against the Machine or REM or Ben Harper or whatever else most college kids were digging. Son Volt just didn't really put on airs about being real; they were real. So eventually I got into Uncle Tupelo and Wilco as well as Jay's solo work, but this is the best of the bunch by my reckoning. Great songs, great singing, just really artistically sound. And excellent for rainy day driving. Actually it's raining right now. Bye!

Surrounded by records that take you stragiht to nowhere and leave you stranded, this record is like driving down a backwoods road in the summertime with the windows open. If you like your rock straight up with a twangy country chaser, this is a record for you.

Son Volt's brand of country-alt-rock is going to invite comparisons to Whiskeytown and other like-minded bands, but the thing that sets them apart is Jay Farrar's ability to navigate between the sweet and the lowdown, then make it into a great song. Loose String, Live Free, and Drown are great uptempo rockers, while Too Early and Out Of the Picture are quieter moments. Like many of the record that I give five stars, however, Trace's strength is as an entire body of songs: this is an album I never get tired of listening to.

If you like early REM, you should definitely give Son Volt a try, and Trace is a great record to start with.

This is one of the five records I would take with me to the proverbial remote island. I never get tired of this classic piece of work. I would not want to be rescued. Not a mediocre tune on this thing. Superb. There is a bar in San Francisco (Club 101 on Van Ness) that has this on the jukebox and I go there simply to hear these songs.

Sounds like 1963, but for now, it sounds like heaven....

Son Volt, a band as cool and enigmatic as their name suggests, have given us with their debut album just what one would have expected them to. Assuming, that is, one were aware of the musical lineage from which the band was born. Their previous incarnation, the well-liked Uncle Tupelo, spent its formative years cultivating the now not-so-indie Country/Rock sound, which began gaining popularity in the early 90s. One wouldn't get much argument though in suggesting that Trace is the genre's most impressive work to date. Jay Farrar, the group's core member, could have easily gotten away with simply putting his name on the album cover - he is as much the group himself as a Neil Young or a Lyle Lovett, other artist's who depend heavily on the contributions of their bandmates. He can in effect do it all. Singing, playing guitar and harmonica, songwriting - all seem to come quite easily to the somewhat withdrawn frontman. In fact, having seen them perform live, I can tell you that being the center of attention seems to be the one part of the job that Farrar isn't too comfortable with. So he's no Sting, big deal. Take nothing away from the rest of the band, however. From Uncle Tupelo, Farrar took one lone member, drummer Mike Heidorn. Very solid on the skins, Heidorn does well to keep his playing simple, just as these subtly powerful songs require. He shows us very occasionaly that he could do a lot more (on "Drown" and "Loose String", most notably), but dutifully plays his part as needed. The rest of the quartet is comprised of a pair of brothers, Jim and Dave Boquist ( musical origins unknown to this reviewer), who are superb musicians themselves. Jim, the bassist, performs quite adequately as Farrar's backing vocal while brother Jim shows his versatility on any number of stringed instruments, including lap steel, fiddle and banjo to name a few. There is a fifth man, pedal steel player Eric Heywood, who contributes greatly to the the record's sound, although credited modestly on the jacket under the "With" heading. The album opens with the infectious "Windfall", a song which, while a bit sunnier than the rest of the album, gives the listener a perfect indication of the overall musical tone of the record. While Country/Rock may be the closest thing to a name for this sound, it seems to be a tad more rock than country. Folk rock seasoned with a little front porch rootsiness, maybe. The heavier tunes on the album do plenty to get the andrenaline flowing. In short, if you put this record on thinking it will help you get to sleep at night, you've clearly gotten the wrong idea. Jay Farrar, who boasts a very distinctive voice, impresses us equally with how he uses it. Singing his own well-written lyrics, he seems highly conscious of how he wants to let the vocal itself act as an instrument, gracefully weaving through a carefully selected series of notes. This effort pays off, transforming what might have otherwise been very skippable tracks like "Out of the Picture" into some very effective songs, indeed. In fact, one of the best attributes of the new band is that Farrar handles lead vocal duties by himself, whereas in Uncle Tupelo they were shared equally between Farrar and co-frontman Jeff Tweedy. Here we have Jay all to ourselves, and we're better off for it (Tweedy is a fine singer himself, but..). Why that band broke up exactly, who's to say. All I know is that Jay Farrar has as much genuine musical talent as anyone of his generation. Listening to Trace, we begin to see just what he intends to do with it.

Son Volt's "Trace" is a fantastic album, especially for those you who enjoy fantastic lyrical story telling. The music and lyrics, while certainly melancholy and at times dark and depressing, paint pictures of love lost, loneliness, sadness, and desperation, which makes is so compelling and enjoyable to listen to.

I discovered Son Volt via an Internet Radio station was immediately intrigued by their sound. It is tough to pigeon-hole Son Volt into a particular genre. Their sound is an amalgamation of country, rock, a little punk, and is often categorized under the "Alternative County" heading. Fans of Uncle Tupelo, Jay Farrar's early band with Wilco frontman Jeff Tweedy should find "Trace" just as enjoyable, if not more so, than any Uncle Tupelo release.

It is tough to pick a favorite song; all on the album are strong. The album's open tune "Windfall" conjures up the image of a lonely soul driving down an empty highway in the middle of nowhere, running away from something. "Tear Stained Eye" is a country-influenced song that tells of loneliness, with its haunting lap steel guitar and fiddle, beautifully accompanied by a banjo. "Ten Second News" is another gem about loneliness and isolation. Just when you start to settle into the country influence, Jay Farrar and company turn the amps and guitars up loud and heavy on "Route" and the minor AOR hit, "Drown".

This is a great album from start to finish. If you enjoy Uncle Tupelo, Ryan Adams, Wilco, Kelly Willis, and even Neil Young, you'll definitely love Son Volt and "Trace"!

i played this over and over on a 3,000 mile road trip. it is one of the most complete albums of all time. i would be surprised if you can't relate to at least one verse in every song. "over the falls in a barrel, is where the answers have gone" or "when in doubt- move on- no need to sort it out". just true and sincere, this is a diary which can deliver you to best place and the worst place the world has to offer

There are albums that come and go and you never listen to again. There are albums you pick up a year after you got tired of them and give 'em another spin now and then. Then there are albums that grab you from the first note.... and burn themselves into your conscience, never to be forgotten much less left at home in the CD tower. This is one of those albums. Trace is a majestic, heartbreaking tour de force... a journey under the overcast skies of small town middle America. Windfall is one of the greatest country songs not sung by someone named Hank, Willie, Johnny or Merle. Trace is a new classic... an album not to be left out of the collection of country fans, Springsteen fans, alt-country fans or just lovers of good music. This is Americana at it's zenith. Jay Farrar's masterpiece.

Talk about the passion. No, this isn't a review of Murmur, though if you listen closely to Trace, there is no denying that Jay Farrar and his band Son Volt have been influenced by 1980s R.E.M. The passion I'm talking about here is the passion Son Volt clearly feel for the country/rock music they make, as well as the passion you'll feel for this album once you fall under its spell.

If you're like me and have found yourself "searchin' for a truer sound" in recent years, you need not look any further than the opening track on Trace, "Windfall", to find it. Very few songs in this world are perfect from beginning to end, but "Windfall" falls into this exalted category. Astonishingly enough, two songs later, "Tear Stained Eye" nearly tops "Windfall", plunging you into a beautiful melancholia in the process. Just when you are ready to start crying into your IBC, "Route" rocks you back up from the depths of despair. That catch in Jay Farrar's voice when he sings the word "reality" is absolutely gorgeous and the song is as anthemic as anything U2 have ever produced.

Though as the Amazon reviewer astutely points out, many of the songs on Trace deal with the inevitable passage of time, it is not always easy to grasp the meaning of Farrar's lyrics. As Michael Stipe or Robert Plant would tell you, however, this lyrical obliqueness is not necessarily a bad thing. To this day, I can't tell you what most of Lifes Rich Pageant is about, yet it still sounds darn good to me. And, as you can tell by my review, Trace sounds darn good to me as well.

This is music so good that you can smell it. It smells like fresh air, hay, the taste of a cold beer on a hot day, a pretty sunset. It smells like the wind, crackly static, and the first fish you ever caught. Then later, it picks up, and it starts to smell like the first bar you ever went into, and the first cigarette you ever smoked. It smells like girl in front of you's perfume as you stood there, waiting for the show to start and wondering how you'd talk to her- hoping that maybe she'd back up and bump into you - or like standing outside on a rainy day.
And when you're done listening to it for the first time - or even the hundredth time, it smells like heaven.