The first new Son Volt full-length
in seven years, Okemah and the Melody
of Riot boasts exactly one original
member: Jay Farrar, the band’s founder, frontman, and
songwriter. It wasn’t supposed to be this way. After
contributing a track to an Alejandro Escovedo tribute compilation, Farrar, Mike Heidorn,
and Jim and Dave Boquist planned to release a fourth Son Volt
album. Then, mere weeks before the first recording session was
scheduled to take place, Farrar and the other musicians hit a
contractual wall and broke up for good. The Escovedo cover, meant
to herald the quartet’s phoenixlike resurrection, became the
band’s swan song — or so it would seem. Rather than
record another solo album with a rotating cast of guest musicians
or reconvene Canyon (his backing band on last year’s live set
Stone, Steel and Bright Lights), Farrar made the controversial decision to re-form
Son Volt, recruiting former Canyon drummer Dave Bryson, ex-Meat
Puppets bassist Andrew Duplantis, and alt-country veteran Brad Rice
on guitar. Loyal fans were understandably confused by the
switcheroo: If Son Volt was just another vehicle for Farrar’s
“rock persona,” as one press release clumsily phrased
it, what distinguishes a Son Volt album from a solo Jay Farrar CD?
A single spin of Okemah should put this pesky question to rest.
SV-Mach II rocks like a rock band, not like a rock persona, and
despite the absence of Heidorn and the brothers Boquist, it sounds
more like vintage Son Volt than solo Farrar. With its opening
volley of fuzz and twang, “Bandages and Scars”
announces that this is a guitar record, all ragged glory and
crackling amps. Although organ, piano, and harmonica surface
occasionally, guitars dominate the CD: They screech and buzz, howl
and sigh, sing and squall — sometimes they even
impersonate sitars. The absence of synthesizers and tape loops is not a
step backward for Farrar, whose recent experiments in sound collage
have irritated some dyed-in-the-flannel Tupelophiles; if anything, the
standard guitars/bass/drums template makes his iconoclasm more
striking. He hasn’t abandoned his signature tunings, his slippery
vocal melodies, his stream-of-consciousness lyrics, but he’s
grounding them in familiar soil. It’s like stumbling over a
spaceship in the middle of the prairie.
Galvanized by his band’s rock heroics,
Farrar sings with a new urgency, his burnished moan sturdy and
defiant one moment, bruised and wobbly the next. It soars and
swerves with a wild litheness on “Afterglow 61,” a
mercury-laced meta-anthem that pays cryptic homage to Mark Twain,
Leadbelly, and Bob Dylan. On the scathing but sorrowful Bush dis
“Jet Pilot,” he delivers the verses in a guileless
falsetto and then bellows the chorus over a sudden onslaught of
guitars.
Although his lyrics will never be described as
straightforward, Okemah finds Farrar more direct than he’s been in
years. The album’s title refers to the birthplace of Woody
Guthrie, and it’s a worried man’s CD, dense with topics
that should trouble any conscientious world citizen: the endless
war, the corrupt system, the toxic atmosphere, the uncertain
future. For Farrar, the father of two young children, the only hope
for salvation lies in the creative impulse, the “vinyl disc
with power to hypnotize” that unites three generations in
“Gramophone,” the “Six String Belief”
embodied by “rock and & roll, alive and kicking.”
Let the dirt-rockers and happy-haired fashion boys strike their
cynical poses; revolution, after all, is wasted on the young. In
redeeming the dreaded dad-rock tag, Son Volt has done something far
more radical. As mature as it is revelatory, Okemah is music to blast from
the minivan.
This article appears in Jul 14-20, 2005.
