keepers 5
keeper avg .385
Mike Cooley starts DBT's tenth album with a shit-kicker, "Shit Shots Count"****, while "Hearing Jimmy Loud"***** struts even harder, with each of Cooley's stinging lyrics punctuated by guitar riffage. Cooley's other contributions include the modest "Primer Coat", which is so plain it sounds like any 90's jangle-pop, and the heavy country-soul "Natural Light." Quasi title song "Made Up English Oceans" channels the urgency and mystery of "Ghost Riders In The Sky" (Vaughn Monroe's popular version to be specific), though Cooley delivers with a gentle lilt rather than the expected booming baritone. That's a lot of writing for Cooley (also including "First Air Of Autumn"), and indeed this is the first DBT album where he contributed nearly half of the songs; it's also the only album except for Dirty South that begins with a Cooley-credited track.
Meanwhile, Patterson Hood's "When He's Gone" comes off a more-nuanced "Better man", played in predictable Crazy Horse-style, and "Pauline Hawkins"**** is good basic Americana. On the "The Part Of Him"**** Hood creates an interesting hybrid bluegrass by attempting to emulate banjo on his guitar, and a dark, somber atmosphere on country ballad "When Walther Went Crazy," which unfortunately provides diminishing returns if the cliched story is analyzed, summarized in these four lines:
When Walter went crazy, they say he just snapped
It had gone on for so long and she wasn’t coming back
She hadn’t been off the couch in at least a dozen years
Deafened by the silence and the grinding of the gears
"Til He's Dead Or Rises" (the first track written by Hood but sung by Cooley) has a groove so "stones-y" Hood must have written it in an attempt to get "Starfucker" out of his head; it's a really good Rolling Stones imitation down to the recurring double entendre "he rises to the occasion" (which is as strained as Cooley's attempt to hit notes at the top of his range) and Jay Gonzalez's Ian McLagan-like keyboard accents (I know he's the Faces, same thing really). Though stylistically slightly more bold, Hood's lyrics on this album show a tendency to be simplistic compared to Cooley's, which are stronger with fleshed-out characters and stories. Regardless, Hood has the last word on the stately "Grand Canyon"*****, which doesn't say anything really profound in words but fortunately says enough.
When Walter went crazy, they say he just snapped
It had gone on for so long and she wasn’t coming back
She hadn’t been off the couch in at least a dozen years
Deafened by the silence and the grinding of the gears
"Til He's Dead Or Rises" (the first track written by Hood but sung by Cooley) has a groove so "stones-y" Hood must have written it in an attempt to get "Starfucker" out of his head; it's a really good Rolling Stones imitation down to the recurring double entendre "he rises to the occasion" (which is as strained as Cooley's attempt to hit notes at the top of his range) and Jay Gonzalez's Ian McLagan-like keyboard accents (I know he's the Faces, same thing really). Though stylistically slightly more bold, Hood's lyrics on this album show a tendency to be simplistic compared to Cooley's, which are stronger with fleshed-out characters and stories. Regardless, Hood has the last word on the stately "Grand Canyon"*****, which doesn't say anything really profound in words but fortunately says enough.
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