Plumbiferous Media

After work­ing with musi­cians includ­ing Ryan Adams, Gillian Welch, and Bright Eyes, David Rawl­ings released his first solo album, A Friend of a Friend, in Novem­ber as Dave Rowl­ings Machine. While A Friend of a Friend shows influ­ences from many of the gen­res Rawl­ings has worked in, it mainly serves as an entry into the field of coun­try and blue­grass. Unfor­tu­nately, A Friend of a Friend suf­fers from a num­ber of fairly seri­ous issues and in the end does not turn out to be ter­ri­bly successful.

Dave Rawling’s vocals clearly show ele­ments from both coun­try and clas­sic rock, but unfor­tu­nately, it’s not done quite as well as the best exam­ples from either genre. Rawling’s voice often falls into a styl­is­tic whine, which, while fit­ting the genre, is very evi­dently tacked on top of Rawling’s stan­dard vocal style, beg­ging the ques­tion of whether it is really nec­es­sary at all. The best tracks on the album (includ­ing “Method Act­ing / Cortez the Killer”) include seg­ments where Rawling’s Bob Dylan impres­sion works fairly well, but they’re cer­tainly lim­ited - and even more unfor­tu­nately, the restraint that this small bit of suc­cess requires extends to all of the music, mak­ing these sec­tions both the most vocally pleas­ing and the least inter­est­ing otherwise.

Lyri­cally, A Friend of a Friend is, more than any­thing else, des­per­ately folksy. Tracks like “To Be Young (Is To Be Sad, Is To Be High)” are exactly as deep as could be expected from the title (that one con­tains the line “When you’re young you get sad / And you get high”). For­tu­nately, how­ever, that’s the lyri­cal low point of the album. The rest of it is largely use­less but benign - there’s not much sub­stance to be found, but at least it’s not painful to lis­ten to.

As men­tioned, the instru­men­tals on a num­ber of tracks sim­ply do not sup­port their length, most notice­ably the first track, and a chunk of the album run­ning from “Method Act­ing / Cortez the Killer” to “Hours about You.” Clearly meant to focus the listener’s atten­tion on the vocals, which, admit­tedly, are often at their best, the instru­men­tals them­selves are repet­i­tive to the point of inanity and by no means war­rant tracks around five min­utes in length, let alone the ten min­utes of “Method Act­ing / Cortez the Killer.” Addi­tion­ally, focus­ing the listener’s atten­tion on the vocals often has the unfor­tu­nate side effect of focus­ing atten­tion on the lyrics, which, in these tracks, include such inani­ties as the (repeated) lines from “Sweet Tooth:” “I’m going to the doc­tor / gonna pull my sweet tooth,” and “Come on give me some of that Novocaine.”

That said, when the instru­men­tals are good, they are very good. The first instance occurs on “To Be Young (Is to Be Sad, Is to Be High),” where Rawlings’s unique, occa­sion­ally highly stringy gui­tar style inter­acts beau­ti­fully with the almost overly-rich bass. But Rawl­ing can do more than mesh tones nicely. Many tracks, espe­cially dur­ing vocal absense show excel­lent exam­ples of coun­ter­point and sec­ondary melodies. Pos­si­bly the best track for instru­men­tals is “It’s Too Easy,” which uses an incred­i­ble, rich fid­dle part, backed up per­fectly by an active bass and syn­co­pated guitar.

Dave Rawl­ings is an immensely tal­ented musi­cian, and it clearly shows on A Friend of a Friend. Unfor­tu­nately, it shows up all too sparsely. Most tracks either have solid instru­men­tals or solid vocals, rarely both simul­ta­ne­ously, and few tracks have truly inter­est­ing lyrics. Addi­tion­ally, the album does not seem to be con­structed incred­i­bly care­fully. The dynamic changes are often abrupt, and Rawl­ings gen­er­ally either goes for loud or quiet, and almost never some mid­dle ground. Finally, the album seems to peter off as it goes, with fewer and fewer truly inter­est­ing tracks as it pro­gresses. So while the album is cer­tainly inter­est­ing, it is not even quite as good as an aver­age album.

This post is tagged 40-49, Dave Rawlings Machine