The Minus 5
Killingsworth
Rating: 2.0/5.0
Label: Yep Roc
Ever since Sweetheart of the Rodeo or that obscure Beau Brummels album rock snobs namedrop, hyper-hooky pop acts have been eager to don synthetic Stetsons for a country album. The typical stance amounts to: "Hey kids, country is cool, but we're still cooler than country." In the best instances, say, King of America or Rabbit Fur Coat, artists bring both an informed perspective on the genre's history and a deft ability to tailor their strengths to the idiom. More often artists overestimate their own protean versatility, and the album is a self-indulgent non-entity; Ben Kweller's Changing Horses, from earlier this year, is a recent example of this tendency. And quite disappointingly, so is the Minus 5's Killingsworth.
The Minus 5 is a showcase for Scott McCaughey, a consistently original, tirelessly prolific and notoriously melodic songwriter, originally of Young Fresh Fellows and occasionally of R.E.M. Its revolving-door membership almost always includes Peter Buck, and has included Posies tag-team Jon Auer and Ken Stringfellow. In 2002, the Minus 5 released Down with Wilco, a sort of anti-Yankee Hotel Foxtrot that, with game participation from much of Tweedy's crew, effectively blew a raspberry in the face of Yankee's middlebrow self-seriousness. But Killingsworth sounds too much like an actual Wilco album; the first half may as well be outtakes from Wilco's latest yawner. McCaughey's new colleagues come from another overrated NPR-approved band: The Decemberists. After Colin Meloy warbled his way through "Cemetery Row" (an otherwise poignant McCaughey composition) on the Minus 5's self-titled 2006 album, McCaughey invited much of Meloy's day-job group to jam their way through Killingsworth's rustic murder ballads and faux-folk excursions. The Decemberists simply drain the life out of what is already a rather lifeless album.
But let us not lay blame on the guests: the fault here is McCaughey's, first and foremost. He has created a country album that is blander than chicken broth. The problem is that, while McCaughey is an expert pop craftsman, he is hardly a country singer or songwriter. His impressionistic lyrics lack the focus needed to deliver linear country tunes, and he relies on four-or-five-syllable words when the monosyllabic choice would suffice. Though country is a voice-driven genre, McCaughey always sings through an aw-shucks grin, lacking the vocal sincerity to work within a genre dependent on the singer's utter conviction. His voice often sounds tentative and quavering, and on songs like "The Lurking Barrister" and "Vintage Violet," he is overpowered by the She Bee Gees (a female Bee Gees cover band), who sprinkle (and sometimes smother) Watson Twins-style harmonies throughout the album.
Thus, Killingsworth is unlikely to send fans in the direction of Possum or Waylon; it's just as likely to confirm their longstanding prejudices towards the genre. Take "I Would Rather Sacrifice You" as an example. A brisk, airy melody make it one of Killingsworth's more insistent cuts, but it cannot decide whether it's paying homage to, or taking umbrage with, righteous white gospel. "I would rather sacrifice you than to miss sweet Jesus' call/ I will die a Christian soldier if I ever die at all," McCaughey vows in a mocking tone that suggests an appropriation not of reverence, but of superiority. In a more straightforward performance, the song could be an item of beauty and power, even transcendence. But its over-the-top pronouncements paint it into irony's confining corner. "Sacrifice"'s successor, "Ambulance Dancehall," revels in the same sort of ethnographic posturing, its small-town caricatures seemingly rendered by a city-dweller who spends his weekends frequenting "white trash parties."
An excess of pedal steels, banjos and brushed snares cannot mask McCaughey's utter misunderstanding of, or even subtle contempt for, country music. Throughout the album, McCaughey strains to critique the tenets of the American hinterland (i.e., country music's fanbase): religion, guns, virtue. But like too many indie musicians - especially amidst the alt-country brethren, which is by definition exclusionary, if not elitist - McCaughey's critiques are smugly dismissive when they could be sympathetically complex. Remember that this is a man whose earlier band penned a scathing attack on Amy Grant, which was funnier and more believable than anything here.
Worse yet, McCaughey fills Killingsworth with his slightest, dullest material in years, as if imitating Harlan Howard or Leon Payne is a lesser task than imitating Lennon or Wilson. "The Long Hall" and "Gash in the Cocoon" promise hooks that, upon arrival, are flimsy and unsatisfying. He lets Meloy sing lead on "Scott Walker's Fault," a psych-pop homage to the baroque-pop god, to whom the Minus 5 owe far more than the Decemberists. Nevertheless, it still registers as the album's most heartfelt moment. To be fair, McCaughey does offer a couple gems worthy of his reputation. "Big Beat Up Moon" elegantly captures urban isolation, while "Smoke On, Jerry" is an amusing character sketch thankfully not about the Grateful Dead frontman. But those scant highlights are anomalies, the only Killingsworth cuts that reach the admittedly high bar McCaughey's previous work has set.
The upside is that McCaughey's profligate habits will eventually render Killingsworth an insignificant blemish, by no means the first, on a storied discography. Concurrent with Killingsworth's release, McCaughey is also releasing the first studio album by his much louder, punkier band, Young Fresh Fellows, in eight years. That album, I Think This Is, is everything McCaughey is capable of being, and everything Killingsworth is not: exciting, hilarious, lively, fun. Killingsworth may simply be the downside of its creator's non-stop indie-pop workaholism: he's human, he's fallible, and not all of his constant ideas are going to work. That may make it excusable, but it doesn't make it any more enjoyable.
by Charles A. Hohman