The Sadies’ signature melange of honky-tonk-surf-rhythm-&-blues perfectly suits this collection, in which Jon Langford unleashes his angry heart on the dark side of manhood (ambivalent love, indiscriminate aggression, the rock ‘n’ roll lifestyle), hurtling headlong, bruised and half-blinded, riddled with remnants of what could be self-knowledge and compassion.
Like another Langford side-project, Skull Orchard, this disc puts his voice right out front, and we are reminded that the man can sing. His tunefulness is just barely, credibly frayed, and that by pure emotion. It’s an asset lost in the raging barrage of the Waco Brothers’ sound, and rarely highlighted in other collaborative efforts. Sally Timms’ gentle croon is the sunlight at the edge of his threatening clouds.
On “American Pageant”, the Sadies provide a raunchy Richards-esque guitar onslaught with spectacularly heavy bass and drums. The music underscores the aggression, machismo and thoughtless adrenalin rush of war: “We scared you bastards shitless and went from house to house/Playing drum rolls on the bathtub, we threw the baby out.” By contrast, the equally emotionally powerful “Shipwreck” plays as a heartbroken ballad of regret for lost love and life ill-spent.
The closer, “Are You An Entertainer”, would disabuse anyone’s fantasies of life on the road. Its chorus — “Get the money, don’t leave anything behind/Just some pieces of your heart and fragments of your mind” — links verses fraught with loneliness and disorientation, and it ends with death “after all those hours of working, all the bottles and the beds.”
“Little Vampires” offers Bob Egan a star turn on searing pedal steel, and Ken Sluiter takes off his engineer’s cap to sing bass on “What Makes Johnny Run”, in which the Sadies musically paraphrase the Wacos’ “We’re Too Sweet To Die”. But it’s Langford and the Sadies, in remarkable cohesion, who drive this record convincingly into our millennial malaise, and ultimately bivouac substantially closer to Steve Earle than either the rowdy Wacos or the venerable Mekons.
