Ten years, eight albums, three chords, and one truth: that music, as the Lovin’ Spoonful put it, can free your soul. Centro-matic by the numbers? Raw stats rarely do justice to artists — did we mention the hundreds of songs leader Will Johnson has unspooled via this Texas group and his solo and side projects? — yet playing the tally game with Centro-matic consistently yields dividends.
How do we love Fort Recovery? Let me count the ways. There’s grandiosity afoot (the musical kind, not wrung from hubris), and in such songs as the crashing, dynamics-rich “Covered Up In Mines” and fuzzed-out psychedelic soul-bomb “Monument Sails”, Johnson and band are as grandly, shamblingly anthemic as Neil Young & Crazy Horse were at the dawn of the ’90s.
There’s serenity as well. Several softer interludes dot the record, notably the downcast but dreamy “I See Through You” (its strings/piano motif recalls Alejandro Escovedo), effectively sketching the linkage between Centro-matic and South San Gabriel, the high-lonesome, more atmospheric sister group Johnson launched a few years back. And there’s utter celebration in the buoyancy of “Patience For The Ride”, a gleaming, crunching power-pop gem that could pass for long-lost Big Star.
“And so we’re beginning at the end”, sings Johnson in “Patience”, in his yearning, lazy rasp (Jay Farrar meets J Mascis), adding, “with a message transmitted by the air.” Elliptical optimism serves the man well. It matches his band’s brand of sonic exhilaration. That noise? It’s your soul being liberated.