Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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30 of 30 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Ground-breaking then, phenomenal still today, October 31, 2000
To properly understand the magnitude of this album, it is important to place it in context of its time: the year was 1983. Violent Femmes' first album was a college-radio hit, and expectations were high for their second album. Yet here was a collection of songs that sounded like an adenoidal Lou Reed channelling Johnny Cash on bad speed, singing with maniacal glee about Jesus and country deaths and menacing rains, two whole years before Nick Cave's FIRSTBORN IS DEAD, before John Doe and Exene would form The Knitters, etc. The only other "pre-alternative" bands even remotely capable of invoking this spectre of country-folk/gospel despair were the Minutemen and Violent Femmes' labelmates Los Lobos, yet never with this much wide-eyed tormented zeal. Not only does this album swing low like a sweet chariot, it sways like a rusty pendulum (see "I Know It's True But I'm Sorry To Say", exhumed from the same frozen wastelands of the soul that contained the Velvet Underground's "Sunday Morning"). Gano sings like a man possessed by some lost psychotic spirit, and the band rolls behind him like an avalanche, uprooting everything laid down before (including the Femmes' once-promising career as college-rock smartasses). An utter masterpiece.
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8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Not Perfect, But Still Great, July 5, 2002
By A Customer
Though not as consistently brilliant as their debut album, VF's Hallowed Ground nevertheless contains their 3 best songs. A few groups have tried to marry the desperation of Appalachian murder ballads and the fury of punk but there has never, in my opinion, been more successful attempts before or since Gordon Gano's Country Death Song and I Hear The Rain. Both musically and lyrically, the songs capture the essence of old-time mountain music and punk rock, creating a hybrid that left me stunned to the core the first time I heard them. Almost 20 years later, these songs have lost none of their power on me.
The 3rd masterpiece on this album is Never Tell, a song about unspecific childhood bullying and/or blackmail sung, written and performed in a manner so extreme as to raise the storyline to the level of myth. I don't think Gano wrote this song so much as the song spewed out of him whole.
I think it is a shame that most VF fans whose lives were changed by that groundbreaking first album have not listened to other musical genres to fully appreciate Hallowed Ground, with its mix of old-time, gospel, jazz and funk. I have friends who still don't believe me when I say that Jesus Walking On The Water is not a parody. I think all you punk rock fans ought to check out some Roscoe Holcomb albums before you listen to this one.
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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Awesome album!, April 11, 2001
This is probably my favorite VF cd ever. Next to it would be their first (self-titled) and then "Blind Leading the Naked."
Pure and simple...this is a great release. I recently noticed that this has been re-released on the Rhino label (of all labels)! I still have the original Slash label pressing, as well as the WB release of the cd, and play them quite frequently. I remember how cool these guys were back in the day, and how cool these songs still are (at least, up until album "3").
Do take notice however that "Country Death Song" mirrors, extremely closely, Bob Dylan's "Ballad of Hollis Brown." Yes, 20 years prior to VF, Bob sang about a weary, destitute farmer who spends the last dollar to his name on a box of shotgun shells to off his family, then himself, with. But, kudos VF for putting a different spin on it.
This album is particularly worth the investment for "I know it's true..." alone. That song, along with "Please...do not go away" on their self-titled album (and, of course, the sweet and tender ditties on the "Blind" cd) got me through the trials and tribulations of adolescence--along with the angst of the "Living in Darkness" album by Agent Orange and "Richard Hung Himself" by D.I., and possibly every Descendents' lp up to "Milo Goes to college."
Ah, the beauty of adolescence in the '80s. I remember it well.
Well, I hope you forgive this review being somewhat off-topic. It brought back alot that I didn't forsee becoming part of this.
In short, the best, if not second best, release by VF. Very worth getting, along with the other two best (Self-titled, and "Blind").
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