Ben Kweller
Changing Horses
Rating: 2.0
Label: ATO
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Ben Kweller has recorded a country album, the supposed product of a Texan childhood spent listening to Garth Brooks. But of course, Kweller is an indie-rocker, so the album instead ends up sounding like Gram Parsons. A lot like Gram Parsons, actually. It’s almost as if Kweller saturated his ears with The Gilded Palace of Sin and Grievous Angel in a shameful effort to expunge his psyche of mainstream country, the kind his fan base and label deplore, and the kind that dominated country radio during his youth. Only there are no indie rockers making records that sound like Garth Brooks did 15 years ago, or like Brad Paisley does now. The ones who dabble in country all want to sound like Parsons did damn near 40 years ago. Kweller is simply throwing his boutique-bought Stetson hat into a ring already overcrowded with buskers begging to be Ryan Adams or Will Oldham.
Had Kweller drawn more from Alan Jackson or Brooks & Dunn, Changing Horses might have been a less listenable record, but it would invariably have been less boring as well. By drawing too heavily from the Parsons well, Kweller plays country in the worst possible way: safe. This is most apparent in the five-but-feels-like-50-minute album opener “Gypsy Rose,” a plodding roundabout that takes its precious time going nowhere, with repetitive dobro-and-finger-pickin’ verse and a clumsy waltz of a chorus idling about in a nerve-racking meander. “Fight,” meanwhile, is a crash-landing Burrito, with eye-rolling references to truckers, the workingman’s struggle and the fight to “find the Lord in your life,” rendered with requisite distance, palpable more as ethnography than emotion. “Things I Like to Do” revises Tom T. Hall’s “I Love” into a somehow even more saccharine, and infinitely more strained, ersatz-bluegrass love song.
Changing Horses is structured as a two-sided record. Each song from the first half has a corresponding companion in the second half, yet the second half is considerably stronger. “Sawdust Man” has all of “Gypsy Rose’s” ambition – shifting time signatures, strenuous vocal acrobatics and out-there flourishes – and none of its aimless wanderlust. With its exultant piano pounding, it is more Schoolhouse Rock than “Sin City,” and it’s easily the best thing Changing Horses has to offer. That it’s also the least identifiably country track on the album speaks to this experiment’s failure.
Elsewhere, Kweller recovers his cunning pop craft for two songs that recall not Parsons but the bedeviled antithesis of “true” country rock: the Eagles (who have, ironically and deservedly, been embraced by the Nashville establishment in a way Parsons never was). “Hurtin’ You” finds Kweller getting into Glenn Frey’s groove, with the Pierces proving the beguiling harmonists Timothy B. Schmit and Don Felder never were. “On Her Own,” another polished pop song with a slide guitar, is a relaxed character study, one that both celebrates and chides female autonomy. With its obligatory and only mildly witty Hurricane Katrina invocations, it provides the lyrical nucleus of an often superficial album, one that settles for cliché and platitude in lieu of non sequitur and aphorism (from the guy who famously sang “Sex reminds her of eating spaghetti,” no less). Worse yet, it implicitly assumes that cliché and platitude lay at the heart of great country music, the kind of assumptions common to cool-conscious onlookers convinced Gram Parsons typifies country.
At least Parsons had a voice though. In country music, voice is imperative, and Kweller’s is too reedy and thin to sell a country ballad: many of these songs might be better served by a more interpretive, capable vocalist. Kweller’s got the chops for glorious pop-rock, but he can sell melodies more than he can sell pathos. “Ballad of Wendy Baker” and “Homeward Bound” are so restrained, so painstakingly muted, that they barely exist as songs, and their potential emotion is wasted.
Like most misguided genre experiments, Changing Horses is crushed under the weight of its own self-consciousness, which its dull and with only fleeting glimpses of the off-the-cuff, hook-heavy tunefulness on which Kweller built a sterling reputation. The musician tries too hard to pay homage to a genre he doesn’t fully comprehend, kind of like Parsons. But where Parsons’ music often redeemed his outsider’s lack of authenticity, Kweller’s country excursions only accentuate his phoniness. From its title to its cover art, seldom does Changing Horses achieve anything greater than a city boy playing dress-up at the western wear shop.
by Charles A. Hohman
