Looking Into The "Cracked Rear View", 30 Years On

Post grunge, were we that uncool, or were we being intentionally uncool?

I asked myself as I was listening recently to "Cracked Rear View", the album that might have signaled the true shift from grunge to whatever we want to call the period afterward. Hootie & The Blowfish were an odd choice to become the biggest band in the country, and yet fifteen million copies of the record meant they were the biggest new thing since Nirvana destroyed an entire decade in one fell swoop.

If you want to get angry, think about this; "Cracked Rear View" is actually a bigger record than "Nevermind".

I told you it would make you angry.

Seeing the band failing to catch passes from Dan Marino in a music video, while wearing the horrid fashion of the day, is quite the interesting look back. I was not old enough when the album came out to understand just how utterly lame Hootie was, so I heard the singles come along and ate them up. Not only has "Cracked Rear View" sat on my shelf for thirty years, but I even own a copy of "Musical Chairs". If you're wondering how or why I don't have "Fairweather Johnson", I can't explain it.

Here's thing thing about Hootie; they're great at being the stupid fun we often say we want music to be. If we were trying to insult them, we could slander them as being just a 'bar band', but is that really such an insult? Those bands draw crowds, and they make people happy, even if they do nothing special we will remember as fine art. There's a place for meat-and-potatoes music, and that's what Hootie specialized in.

I think the key was Darius Rucker's baritone, which set them apart from bands like Gin Blossoms, who were very much in the same mold. Jangly guitars and sing-along melodies came to define that period of time, which I will admit I do miss quite a bit, and perhaps Darius' move into country music has given us a distorted view of what Hootie always was. There were elements of the South, and of country to their sound, but they were merely the latest band following the line from Dylan and Tom Petty, telling stories about America in that uniquely American way.

It makes sense to me that Hootie became so popular, because we were coming out of a time when angst and depression had taken over rock music. While grunge had its charm, there is only so much emotional turmoil the general audience is going to put up with. We were ready to move on to better things, happier thoughts, and I have a feeling grunge was going to fade away even if Kurt Cobain had lived.

Hootie was the band that told us it was ok to have fun with music again, that we could turn it into a party atmosphere, not a pity party. Even on "Let Her Cry", the tempo picks up just enough toward the end to make it into a bit of a jaunt, and not drag things down into the sad story Darius is singing us. We were in a decade of seemingly peace and prosperity, and our music was going to reflect that. It's no wonder that only a few short years later we had the rush of manufactured, sugar-high pop that only made sense when there weren't pressing social issues demanding our attention.

That also explains why Hootie is able to get together and tour regularly, since we need that kind of escape from the endless onslaught the world presents us today. Hootie not just reminds us of a simpler time when we weren't so invested in trying to maintain our own sanity, they are a reminder that dark times eventually end, and something better will come along. I don't know when that will be, or what form it will take, but listening to "Cracked Rear View" is a trip back to feelings that have been absent for far too long.

So as we look at the album on its anniversary, perhaps we need to remember that some albums are classics for the artistic statements they make, and others are classics for the zeitgeist they captured. That is what "Cracked Rear View" is. I doubt many will ever call it a paragon of songwriting genius, or call it one of the most influential albums ever made, but few records were as of their time as it was.

Being in the right place at the right time is sometimes luck, and sometimes skill. Either way, it's hard to think of the 90s without this record coming to mind. That was a simpler time, and for forty-five minutes we can head back there. I think it's worth doing that every once in a while.

Album Review: The Warning - "Keep Me Fed"

It’s hard to imagine the pressure of being an artist trying to follow up on a breakthrough.  One pictures a dim room, band members sitting under a single bare light bulb, saying to each other “Okay, we made a statement.  What do we do now to follow up?” Fans are rarely content – we are conditioned to believe that the apex could always be ahead.  The central thesis of the soft science of marketing impresses upon us that what’s next is always better than what we have.  

That’s probably an over-dramatization, but that’s the moment The Warning finds themselves in.  They began to turn heads with “Queen of the Murder Scene” two albums back, but that was ripples in a cow pond relative to the floodgates of “Error.”  Suddenly the band was a hot commodity – sold out shows across the country, appearances on whatever remains of the corpse of MTV, attention from major publications, all of it.

Under that weight, how would the band respond?

The short answer is, with measured but confident evolutionary strides, folding more and more influences into the music of their new album “Keep Me Fed,” and sounding contemporary while still incorporating all the rock and roll standbys that helped the band come to prominence in the first place.

First notable moment first – at the end of “Error” was “Martardio,” the album’s only song in the band’s native Spanish.  Overlooked among all the bombastic singles, the song was quietly one of the album’s best songs.  For “Keep Me Fed,” the band plays “Que Mas Quieres,” and drops into the clean up spot on the record (that’s the fourth song, for non-baseball fans,) front and center in the record where it can’t be missed.  Again, it’s one of the stronger songs on the album, this time in the place it deserves.

From this point forward is where the album starts to unfold in new directions.  “MORE” channels a touch of the guitar thump and dire tones of contemporaries Dead Poet Society, and “Escapism” is a bouncy, funky little tune that hits right with a singalong chorus, but then pounds a crusher of a breakdown at the end.  

As the album goes along, there are hallmarks of other familiar names that shade across the speakers, notably the double set of “Hell You Call A Dream” and “Consume,” which calls to mind two different phases of Lacuna Coil’s career.

Let’s not get ahead of ourselves – this is still The Warning.  It would have been easy for the band to double down into their laurels and make “Error” again, or worse yet, stumble backward into a rock and roll album about partying and public drunkenness.  This power trio refuses to do that, instead writing a pained anthem like “Satisfied,” which maintains accessibility and a choral vocal, while speaking candidly about pain and relationships.  This kind of songwriting, coupled with the obvious talent of the three players (and making the correct choices in songwriters to collaborate with,) is makes The Warning stand out from any number of also-ran rock bands in the last twenty years who crashed upon the shore, but receded meekly back into the ocean.

It's been a long time since a band this young caused this level of excitement in the rock and roll scene.  “Keep Me Fed” well, keeps the audience fed by showing new sides of a familiar band. 

Album Review: Orden Ogan - The Order Of Fear

There are certain records that are hard to talk about, not because you don't like them, but because there isn't anything left to say anymore. When a band locks into a style, and they deliver their trademark sound time and again, what exactly do we have other than to say where it slots in with their previous work? I've been asking myself that question as I listen to this new Orden Ogan album, because it is essentially the same album they have already made several times over. There are changes in the lyrical motif to try to make one different than the next, but the reality is that outside of their debut album, they are all pretty much interchangeable.

That has two effects. On the one hand, you know what you're getting when you put the newest record on. If you like Orden Ogan, you're going to like the new record. On the other hand, you know what you're getting when you put the newest record on. If you want to be surprised by anything at all, you're going to be disappointed.

What that means to me is that while I enjoy Orden Ogan, and I usually find their records to be quite good, I seldom find myself moving to listen to them between releases. Their catalog exists in my mind as one giant slab of metal, which isn't the best thing for making me think I need to go back again and again. If I can put on my one favorite of their records, why do I need to listen to the others?

This album continues the multi-record story arc that I can honestly admit I didn't follow a lick of even on the first album it encompassed. After now a couple dozen songs telling this story, I'm not at all interested in whatever the plot of this whole thing is anymore. I've never liked when albums make you do homework listening to the backstory in order to fully appreciate what you're hearing.

The good news is that Orden Ogan hasn't slipped when it comes to writing their anthemic songs. Sure, the single "Moon Fire" is a lethargic one, but the rest of the album delivers the usual fare. We get fast guitar melodies, some chunky chugging, and choirs trying to make everything sound as epic as possible. It's absolutely the sound of a band trying to create a fantasy world through their music, with a song like "Conquest" working well as the tune the characters sing while gathered around and drinking whatever alcoholic concoction exists in their world. That's when Orden Ogan is at their best, even if it's a world I don't have any desire to inhabit.

As I said, at this point the only thing I can really do is say where this record stacks up in relation to their others. To that effect, I maintain "Easton Hope" is still their best album, with everything else in a tight battle right behind it. This record is more consistent than "To The End" was (with it's re-recorded songs from their demos), and it's not as relentless as "Gunmen". That would put it on par with "Ravenhead", which I think is a fitting comparison. They are the two record that try for a hint of diversity in their sound, and succeed for hitting more than one note.

"The Order Of Fear" is another solid Orden Ogan album, and whether that's enough is going to come down to how much hunger you still have for that. I'm not sure I have much.