Customer Reviews

Train Songs

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i bought this cd thinking it would be your typical guitar instrumental type recording (you know: the shadows, the ventures, hellecasters, that sort of thing...), & because of this preconception i almost threw up when i 1st listened to it. i hated it. i really did. puke. and well, "i won't be listening to that again!" i told myself with certainty. but for some reason i kept the thing. i let it hang around my house for about 6 or 7 months, & then in a crazy drunken mood i actually listened to it again. & you know the story. I'm sure you do. I LOVED IT ALL OF A SUDDEN. this is a strange piece of music (& that's how i think of this cd - as one long piece of freaky mood music. you cannot isolate any one track. it all flows together & together on & on). and best of all: it grew on me more and more with each listen. thank God, i kept the thing.

I used to work with this guy who was sort of a connoisseur of adult-contemporary music. (Hi Buck! *waves*) Or at least, that was how another co-worker disparagingly described him. (Hi Elsner! *waves*) He listened to a lot of Brian Eno's later work, timid new-agey style ambient and such. We shared a CD player in the office. One day he brought in Train Songs, and I loved it immediately. It's very soothing instrumental music. The sort of music you let wash over you when you need to relax. I immediately bought my own copy, and was pleased to see that there were two previous albums by Two Dollar Guitar. I bought those as well, figuring they were more of the same. Unfortunately they're not the same as Train Songs. It turns out that Train Songs was Two Dollar Guitar being experimental, and their usual style is some kinda low-fi burnt-out bluesy/folksy mush that'll make you check to see if maybe the drive motor in your CD player is on the fritz. I swear there are moments on the records when the mic has inadvertently picked up the sounds of someone cooking up a fix there in the studio. They also occasionally flirt with math rock. It's important to note that Tim Foljahn's singing voice is wholly unappealing. He sounds like a corpse with a cheap microphone shoved down its throat, then stuffed into a broken-down iron lung. (To be fair, my singing voice is also wholly unappealing, but in a different way. And I don't record mine and try to sell it.) If ever a band was born to be instrumental, it's Two Dollar Guitar.

In summary, buy Train Songs and no other records by TDG. Unless you're willing to buy an entire CD for one good song, in which case you could buy the aptly named album 'Let Me Bring You Down' for the song Let's Play Ghost.