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<\/a>Notes of Blue<\/i> (Thirty Tigers) starts out with a note of comfort. \u201cPromise the World\u201d takes me right back to the late ’90s, when Jay Farrar and Son Volt played with confidence and shared the spotlight with few other bands. Nobody sounded quite like them, not even the other bands filed under \u201cNo Depression,\u201d the genre tag taken from the title of the debut by Farrar’s previous band, Uncle Tupelo. Unfortunately, it\u2019s a false promise. You won\u2019t hear any more pedal steel until the second to last track on the record, and in the meantime, you\u2019ll hear Farrar playing and singing with a frustrating lack of conviction. Maybe he knows this material isn\u2019t worthy of him. Maybe he knows how weak the lyrics are on \u201cBack Against the Wall,\u201d or how little menace is mustered by the plodding \u201cMidnight.\u201d Maybe he knows that much of this record comes off like Tom Petty fronting the Black Keys. That might even be intentional.<\/p>\n\u201cLost Souls,\u201d which doesn\u2019t quite manage a riff or a melody, is built around a middle section so generic it could have been lifted from pretty much any Third Man Records release. On \u201cStatic,\u201d Farrar slides his voice all over the verses, up and down the scales, complaining about his \u201cmind turned upside down\u201d and his time not being long enough. The guitar and drums sound pretty tough here, but Farrar\u2019s voice comes out more whiny than gritty. I think I\u2019m meant to feel his pain, but it only make me turn inward.<\/p>\n
And it\u2019s not that I want Farrar to remake Trace<\/i> every time out. Twenty years on, most of Son Volt\u2019s releases have served up both originality and authenticity as Farrar has mined every available corner of the back country genres. Taken as a whole, it\u2019s a catalog with more hits than misses and an impressive breadth, especially considering it\u2019s been essentially a one-man project for the last 15 years. But this album isn\u2019t nearly as convincing as it needs to be, nor as fun as I\u2019d like it to be.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Notes of Blue<\/i> starts out with a note of comfort. \u201cPromise the World\u201d takes me right back to the late ’90s, when Jay Farrar and Son Volt played with confidence<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[2],"tags":[34,1936,691],"class_list":["post-5658","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-album-reviews","tag-album-review","tag-son-volt","tag-thirty-tigers"],"yoast_head":"\nSon Volt Notes of Blue - 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