Reminding me once again that I still need to check out Cooley's solo album--is it good?
On Patterson Hood's Murdering Oscar (And Other Love Songs), the narrator of the first and title song celebrates his victory over Oscar and those who proffered/remonstrated re salvation, "I saved me, and life forgave me." He may be on Death Row or wherever, but he stillinsists, a little too insistently somehow. Ah yes, the well worn Unreliable Narrator device, but it works here. Notes stretch and trail and hold.
He can't let it go, can't let cruel Oscar go, and vice versa. It's an
Oscar-winning performance. Clear enough, but more subtle/subject to interp than expected, and the dramatic stasis that Hood evidently tends (so often) to go for on Truckers albums works here, the sense of somebody rattling his chains and shivering his freezeframe, as we're kept watching the figure's deep focus/fixation.
Which is overtly the point of the next track, "Pollyanna", and Hood (with
another surprise move, making seemingly unprecedented use of his voice's high end,
by simply chirping) goes from rolling Neil Truckers doom of "Oscar" to Who Sell Out pop scenario over expansive, open-G-sounding Stonesiness, as Pollyanna rolls on(or has rolled on, since all of these songs are aftermath, ho get it Stones/Aftermath), having gathered his mossy heart. "It's a little sticky,she's
a little sticky, I'm a little sticky too, I was just something stuck to her
shoe, now I'll have to find something else to stick to." His characters are
always doing or getting themselves ready or not to do the aftermath, and "Pride of The Yankees" in a third stylistic change, starts as a ballad raising a mug to Lou Gehrig, then without a blink to King Kong falling off the building, to passing mention of 9/11, and wishes he could go hide in the mall, and indeed he sounds like he's swaying along in an echoing mall with a hole (and a nice breeze) in it, talking to his little daughter about carrying, clutching "packages so shiny, and you're so tiny," and it's all the tenderness and fuckedness of and in the world, in him as he's somehow unsurprised(it fits with the fuckedness previously experienced, after all or a while) if in a bit of aftershock, afterglow, afterlife, half-life; the next sudden transition being the next song o course."I Understand Now" is shorts-deep in the midst of domestic battlegrounds, old and moldy and comfortable for the moment anyway, as the narrator gets some kind of 40 watt insight, and really the cumulative thing in just these
first four songs also has me thinking of foo like "9/11 changed everything"
and "All is fair in love and war" and how they're part of the wadding of
changes and transitions, not that all his situations x moments shown don't have their own internal detail and framing distinctions/lifespans, as characters try to get creative in doing the aftermath on the train or frame or sidewalk crack, or playing in bedhead traffic etc It's all about their and their creator's wise use of familiar and strange elements, reshuffling or ripping or lurching or padding or jangling along.(Those last two just listed: "She's a Little Randy" is the stealthy passage of a cougar and the male person studying her, getting her number sympathetically and then some, as Hood makes good use of the high voice again, not chirping this time but like a little tight, mostly dry smoker's voice, with some rheum around the corners, emph by guitar, as he squints over his cig, and maybe drops it to approach her after that last line (steps out of his frame, as can be tricky/lacking in Hood songs) "Foolish Young Bastard" ruefully/hopefully jangles along with a banjo almost hitting him in the nuts, empty canteen percussion def tapping his butt (a bit envied perhaps, by the somewhat exasperated but unsurprised, family-type person watching him go) then "Heavy and Hanging" and "Walking Around Sense" are expressive but stuck inside
a way too familiar Neil Truckers doom (which the title song redeemed and
"Range War"("with you") took to maybe non-doom,[as expressed in playing]more about rich shifting currrents of tenderness/fuckedness and war again) Like "Heavy and Hanging" and "Walking Around Sense" heavy up because he thought he needed something between "Foolish Young Bastard" and the young heart who sings about writing you
a love song in the "Back of a Bible" (not to be eveel, but cos "there were
some blank pages") A shuffle mainly suggesting white boys of 50s til builds
seamlessly to a solo that obliterates the pro forma of the past two tracks, and in
call and response with other instruments. This final passage is brief but
deep, like the best bits of most of the other songs ("Screwtopia" trails the
afterglow through basically obvious faster/softer recurrences, and makes it work;
makes me think of the traces of "Grandaddy" 's innocently plotted future and "Belvedere" 's twisted past, and the other character's traces, notions, smoke) Didn't think he'd carry a whole album without other writers, but he does, given that it's also got a couple of duds like Truckers albums, and most of the Truckers are here, and that certainly helps, and he's seamlessly joining a set of songs from 1994 to much more recent ones (each set or subset benefitting from proximity to the others, for the most part) with accumulated experience as writer, player etc as well as other aspects of life, and that comes across in the adjustments, inclu disruptive moves, within the plot lines and performances of songs (Oh yeah, this album also features really apt and startling use of piano which he says startled him too)