So that new
Robin Williams movie looks promising, I the way that it doesn’t fall into the “Patch Adams,” “Mrs. Doubtfire,” “Bicentennial Man,” “Jack,” typology. Is he on drugs again? I hear he is on drugs again.
The Lindsay Dragged Out (Manup Music, 2006)
I’ve been eagerly waiting for this album to come out for a while (although I should give props to
Manup Music, which really pushed this thing along quicker than one might expect from a new label), The Lindsay have been a band that during my past year in Columbus, Ohio really made a name for themselves by their excellent live chemistry, always managing to pull out a great show- show after show. I loved seeing them live, but to be honest, when I would sober up in the morning (after the first couple of times that I saw them) I couldn’t remember anything specific about their songs… it was almost as if there was a void in their music. Of course, some people might think that to be a bad thing, but it actually popped my interest even more, so much so, that I ordered this baby the day that Manup put it up for pre-sale on their website (I found out that I was their first customer!) because I knew that once I heard it, the pieces would all fall into place. I couldn’t have been more right.
Recorded over at
Columbus Discount this past summer, it sounds crisp and meaty, and in a weird way reminds me a little of the late great
Blue Revision (who called it quits this past year) at times. Hey- in fact there’s a lot of bands that The Lindsay remind me of sometimes:
X,
Neil Young and Crazy Horse,
The Beatles,
Opal,
The Breeders,
Blur,
The Wipers,
Superdrag,
Sonic Youth,
The Wedding Present,
Throwing Muses…etc. but the great thing about The Lindsay is that they (like The Blue Revision) don’t really sound like anything else, and I think that is partially because the songwriting on
Dragged Out is so diverse. It’s hard to think that I used to think of their songs as one big indefinable blob, because they’ve got some excellent songwriters in their ranks, capable of creating a dark and romantic mood across the album that never recycles any ideas or structures. I also like the dynamic between guitarist
Jon Olexovitch and bassist
Gretchen Tepper, as their voices just simply melt into each other, but the effect is never falls static. The drummer
James Lavery is minimal but brutally effective evoking, at times,
Mo Tucker’s big drum, while
Tom Schmidt and Olexovitch subversively turn this fucker into a great big fucking guitar album. I was going to say that it’s hard to pick out a favorite, but the swirling jangle of “Your Contemporaries” is an absolutely mesmerizing exercise in melody and dynamics… and while
Dragged Out is compelling enough to make me listen to it over and over again, every time I hear “Your Contemporaries” chime in mid-way through, the hair on my neck stands on end.
Great album.
