The farther Jay Farrar and Jeff Tweedy run from the lengthening shadow of Uncle Tupelo, the closer together their parallel paths seem to travel. Occasionally, these routes even bisect one another: Tweedy took a bow as a soundtrack artist in 2002 with his eccentric, moody score for Ethan Hawke’s Chelsea Walls, and Farrar now duly takes his turn in the film realm with The Slaughter Rule, a starkly drawn, black-and-white still of a soundtrack that accompanies an arthouse film noted primarily for the praise it generated at last year’s Sundance Festival.
The disc even features Uncle Tupelo’s long-lost cover of Gram Parsons’ “Blue Eyes” (a track that originally appeared on the 1993 Rhino tribute Conmemorativo), which effortlessly sidles up alongside other carefully-selected old-time country covers such as Vic Chesnutt’s echoey, haunted take on “Rank Stranger” and Freakwater’s characteristically creaky and death-fixated Louvin Brothers number “When I Stop Dreaming”.
Swimming in between these river stones are Farrar’s instrumental compositions, which split the difference between the big electric guitar bolts that occasionally guided Tupelo and Son Volt and the contemplative acoustic clouds that added necessary punctuation. The quieter moments recall the finger-picked primacy of Will Oldham’s better work (“Frost Heaves”, “Freight”), while the amplified passages evoke much of what made Tupelo’s original juxtaposition of country and punk so interesting in the first place (“Augusta”, the snaky slide guitars of “Hangman”).
Interestingly, Farrar concedes the soundtrack’s closing statement to the Pernice Brothers, whose funereal version of “Will There Be Any Stars In My Crown?” is truly a stunning sound to behold, tying the record together into a statement that exceeds the individual power of any of the tracks that comprise its running order.
