Enter the suburbs of any city in America lacking mountains or a waterfront, and you could be anywhere: a McDonald’s here, a strip mall there, clusters of nearly identical houses. It’s easy to lose your bearings.
And so it goes with the development of alt-country. As the number of artists grows, so will the number that fall by the wayside in a homogeneous heap. New Hampshire band Say ZuZu, who call themselves insurgent country, could well be one of those casualties. Their self-produced release, Take These Turns, offers a few bright spots, but most of the songs find themselves in a suburban identity crisis that is hardly insurgent.
More than half of the disc’s 14 songs come across like any country-rock single on a Nashville Network video. However, Say ZuZu doesn’t spend the whole 53 minutes in the suburbs. Jon Nolan and Cliff Murphy have enviable voices that harmonize seamlessly. They also share guitar and songwriting duties, and there is some good writing here, including “The Twine Song”, a fast bluegrass shuffle brimming with Murphy’s banjo and catchy mile-a-minute lines such as “nothin’ says twang like a little bit a twine.”
Another standout is “Chamberlain’s Guard”, the story of an 18-year-old Yankee having second thoughts about heading off to Dixie to battle after witnessing the condition of those returning. Steve Ruhm’s straight-out-of-the-1860s snare sets the mood as Nolan’s gentle mandolin pluckings drift gently, then build to a decision-making climax.
But the focus of many of the songs is diluted with Southern-rock guitar solos, hippie groove overtones and verses repeated one more time to fill up the three minutes. Say ZuZu is a band with promise; what they need is a sense of direction.