Album Review: The Ravenna Colt

The Ravenna Colt
Slight Spell
[Removador Records]

Slight Spell by Ravenna Colt is already a contender for most compelling debut of 2010 – and it’s only April.

The Ravenna Colt mastermind Johnny Quaid also happens to be the original guitarist for the ethereal rock outfit My Morning Jacket (whose lead singer and cousin of Quaid, Yim Yames is credited as Associate Producer here). But Quaid is deeply rooted in the Louisville music scene, and throughout the eight tracks that make up the 40 minute Slight Spell, he showcases many of them.

The songs are tinged with a southern twang that leaves a sense of fascination and longing for a bygone era that may or may not have ever existed. Quaid co-produces the record with Wax Fang drummer Kevin Ratterman, and together they create an atmospheric loneliness that seems to be the common thread that runs throughout the songs on Slight Spell.

The album opens with an air of reminiscence as “South of Ohio” pays homage to the simple life he remembers of his childhood in Kentucky. The crying spurts of steel guitar hint at the simplicity that we all try to find as we stray further from youth with age. The heavy-handed country not just here, but throughout the album, vaguely reminds me of Whiskeytown at their finest, when they were playing true, sad-bastard country with no sense irony in sight.

“Now to Begin” rolls off with a suggestion of the sinister, while “Prepare to Be Delivered” follows with a wailing tumble; both songs feature The Fervor’s Natalie Felker on background vocals. She leaves a haunting thumbprint on each track as her soft, affecting voice interlaces with Quaid’s aching croon. And “Foresake and Combine” is by far the most upbeat song on Slight Spell – but as the second-to-last song it still can’t get out from under the indelible sadness that Quaid has cultivated throughout the record.

Album Review: Drive-by Truckers

Drive-by Truckers
The Big To-Do
[ATO Records]

Drive-by Truckers have been making solid albums filled with blue collar tales of Antebellum for the better part of two decades now. And with The Big To-Do, the band’s tenth album, they continue to prove why they are one of the great American rock bands of their generation. And it leaves me to wonder why in an age of pansy rock, is DBT one of the industry’s best kept secrets, and not on the cover of Rolling Stone, Spin, or Mojo.

This ends up a collection of gritty southern-tinted riffs, meticulously calculated grooves, or downhearted tales of woe.

Frontman Patterson Hood, returning from his solo stint with back-up band The Screwtopians last year, seems refreshed with a whole batch of songs about misfits and miscreants. Songs like “Drag the Lake Charlie”, “The Wig He Made Her Wore”, “This Fucking Job”, “After the Scene Dies”, and “The Flying Wallendas”, show Hood’s uncanny ability for flushing fully developed characters out in his lyrics.

Band mates Mike Cooley and Shonna Tucker help Hood with some of the the heavy vocal lifting on as usual. Cooley’s drunken swagger of a voice always serves as a compelling narrator for whatever warped story he’s trying to tell. Because Hood sings of misfits and miscreants, while Cooley’s stories are generally filled over-sexed drunks and bastards. This leaves Shonna to write sweet, soulful tunes about heartbreak and fading love, with a voice ripped from a smoky Delta show room from the 1940’s. Her two tracks on this album “You Got Another” and “(It’s Gonna Be) I Told You So” are show pieces of The Big To-Do, both serving as reminders of how big the real To-Do might actually get.

Album Review: Benjy Davis Project

Benjy Davis Project
Lost Souls Like Us
[Rock Ridge Music]

The boys from Baton Rouge are generally known for writing beer swilling, bar room ballads that reek with an inherent sense of youthful antagonism; but with their fifth album they seem to have mellowed a bit. While it’s good that the band has grown, it kinda marks the end of an era now that they’ve stopped writing catchy, hook-laden rock songs about smoking weed, drinking beer, getting into bar brawls, as well as having as much meaningful and meaningless sex as possible.

Anyway…Lost Souls Like Us seems to be a record written less for bar rooms and more for pop-radio. Seeing as these guys have no problem crafting a song, you might find it surprising that no matter how good their albums are, they always seem to fall flat to their live shows. Their songs have always been compelling, with meticulous arrangements, and carefully crafted hooks; but Benjy & Co. have yet to fully capture that energy on any of their previous albums – More Than Local, The Practice Sessions, The Angie House, and Dust.

“Get High” does echo some of the sentiment of older BDP records…it still seems that the bite in his songwriting might have dulled a bit. However, on “Bite My Tongue” and “Iron Chair” we finally get a glimpse of the sharp, irreverent wit that sparked attention for the band’s earlier albums.

They truthfully they weren’t always resting on good-time party jams, and a majority of the record recalls some of their more nostalgic work. “Mississippi” is a love song to the neighboring state where the guys spend so much time playing and driving through. “Check Your Pockets” is a funky acoustic track that lets Davis wax poetic on second chances at childhood romance. And the closing “You Just Know” is the kind of earnest ballad that leaves you wondering if maybe there really is something called true love.

So I don’t fully know what to make of the adult Benjy. I do know that if these guys have found it necessary to grow-up…maybe it’s time for all of us to grow-up. And that is a sad, sad day.