Whiskeytown
Pneumonia
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Whiskeytown
Pneumonia
Lost Highway, 2001
RiYL: Ryan Adams, John Lennon, Neil Young |
Yeah, you could get it on Napster, or at least part of it. But by and large, once these songs were recorded, they remained stored on tape, and in lead singer/chief songwriter Ryan Adams's jumbled head. Sometimes, during solo shows, Adams would play a tune or two from the album, referring to them as being from the band's new record, called "Never Fuckin' Gonna Come Out."
Well, armed with his newfound solo success after he more or less disbanded Whiskeytown mid-2000 (there has never been an official statement), Adams convinced his new label Lost Highway to finally let those tracks from that lost album get their official release. And the result is sometimes moody, sometimes funny, and nearly all the time brilliant.
Pneumonia, at one point a double album, literally finds Adams stuck between the confining world of alt.country -- a genre that called Whiskeytown its "Nirvana" -- and folk rock, a category he plowed through in his solo debut Heartbreaker.
Remember, Whiskeytown was expected to blow alt.country into the mainstream, to pick up the ashes left by Uncle Tupelo and run to new heights. The band's previous effort, 1997's Strangers' Almanac, made umpteen Top Ten lists, made a minor dent in the charts, and sent Adams to the verge of a breakdown. Young and vulnerable -- he was 21 during the making of Strangers -- Adams spent much of 1998 on the road, a little unsure and extremely uncomfortable being painted as the next Kurt Cobain.
So Pneumonia was the beginning of change for Adams. Musically, it's a natural progression, it appears, to Heartbreaker and his soon-to-be-released new solo album, Gold. While Strangers was built around a few catchy hooks, some loud guitars, and desperate lyrics, Pneumonia varies incredibly. Mixed in with the pensive, moody tunes like "Sit & Listen To The Rain," and "Under Your Breath" are the amazingly poppy tongue-in-cheek numbers like "Mirror, Mirror" and "Paper Moon."
The latter conjures up pictures of Adams at ease, doing his matter-of-fact versions of Brit pop, while the former would have fit nicely on Strangers Almanac. In "Paper Moon," for one, Adams takes the persona of a lounge singer, booming out lyrics like "I'm floating through the heavens / the world is in my arms," complete with strings, marimba, bells and chirping birds. Weird, yes.
But right after the birds fade into the sunset, Pneumonia segues into the slow, plodding "What the Devil Wanted," a different ball game entirely. "My idle hands / they are but tools / apply them well, and you will lose / It's what the devil wanted," Adams croons over the haunting keyboards, owing to the typical "Devil made me do it" murder of his lover.
At its heart, though, Pneumonia is a Whiskeytown album, and Adams's longtime compatriot Caitlin Cary stands out as well. While a fiddler by trade, Cary is best known for her beautiful harmony vocals. The mixing of Adams's rough, gravelly lead with Cary's almost angelic harmonies hits its apex on "Easy Hearts," the strongest track on the record. Cascading strings, slight orchestration and lonely lyrics make this Adams-Cary duet -- the only song co-authored by the pair -- is a moving end to their partnership.
"They move away when you're young / take away where you're from / all the things out in the trees / fall into the breeze."
This tale of growing up and moving on seems to confirm that Pneumonia marks the tidy end to Whiskeytown. If that is indeed the case, they went out with a bang.
RODEO ROB | An expert on all things "alt," Rob spends his days covering the energy industry and his nights covering the DC-area bars. Raise yer glass especially high to this man, for he has contributed to this site constantly since its creation four years ago.