Nick A. Zaino, III: June, 2001

The White Trash Album

And now, a topic inspired by our very own bulletin boards.

It seems like a lot of country and alt.country folks these days are trying to break out of the box, and are finding that the Beatles are just the band to help them. Not that the Beatles aren’t a near omnipresent influence in most any rock music right from the get-go, but there are a bunch of new albums from the roots community that seem to be taking more than a few cues from the British Invasion. The new Pernice Brothers album, The World Won’t End, for example, is filled with sweeping harmonies and strings and piano ballads inspired by the Paul McCartney handbook. Much of Torture, from the Spanic Boys, sounds like the result of locking the father and son duo in a room with Revolver and Rickenbacher for a few months. Swag has the most obvious Beatles feel, going straight for the pop.

This may or may not be a rising trend. I can’t tell. I know it’s there, but I’m not sure yet whether I just found it, or whether it’s just that the bands that are doing it now are a bit better at it, and are bringing their own identities into it. But the Beatles influence in alt.country and rock music is as strong as it has ever been.

Joe Henry may have kicked the alt.country label, but longtime fans should make an effort to look into Scar, his latest release. It’s a slow burner, and no one is about to mistake this music for his Jayhawks-backed material, but there’s some great stuff on the disc. “Rough and Tumble” is a great, laid-back funk tune that wouldn’t have sounded out of place on the Boogie Nights Soundtrack. Maybe I’m prejudiced, being a huge stand-up comedy fan, but “Richard Pryor Addresses a Tearful Nation” is as soulful a tune as Henry has ever penned. Having Ornette Coleman around to play sax doesn’t hurt, either.

It’s getting harder and harder to keep up with Bloodshot Records these days. They’ve cranked out new albums by the Sadies, Trailer Bride, and Alejandro Escovedo in the past month, and have new vinyl from Rex Hobart and the Misery Boys coming soon. They also plan to release an album by The Yayhoos, featuring Terry Anderson, Roscoe Ambel, and Dan Baird sometime this summer. If I didn’t have a gig where I could score review copies, I’d be living in a used CD shantytown somewhere in Chelsea.

Bill Janovitz, he of Buffalo Tom, the Bathing Beauties, and Crown Victoria fame, will release his new solo album on spinART Records, which just released the new Clem Snide album.

I heard some organization gave out awards having something to do with country music. Someone let me know if anything worthwhile happened. I got toilets to clean.

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