Various Artists – Truck Songs
Well, let’s don’t get excited, this ain’t no Rig Rock North kinda thing. No, this Toronto-bred two-disc set is pretty much what it says it is, 30 new truck drivin’ songs, if you accept their premise that “you don’t need a truck to be truckin'”.
So, on the first disc, we get stuff like Flashlight’s “The Tank”, which is ska, and Hickory Allstar Bandwagon’s “666 Got 18 Wheels”, which features both dobro and diggereedoo [sic]. Which reads a lot more interesting than it plays. Mostly the first disc is full of underground rock, precious post-noise experiments, everything you might hear on college radio before you changed stations in search of a song or two.
Disc two opens with Hoofbeats’ “Long Hard Kiss” and soldiers on more in an acoustic/country/folk spirit. Aaron Riches’ “Far” has a kind of growly, coffee-shop charm, Pat Temple’s “Back to Dust” has a Leon Redbone approach to old country-jazz (so does Nouveau Hicks’ “Mr. Hicks”), and Cowboy Junkie multi-instrumentalist Jeff Bird’s “Just Like Drivin’ ” is a swell, jazzy instrumental that Margo Timmins could as well have been singing over and then I’d be happier about things.
But remember that the premise here was to create some new truck drivin’ songs, and sure enough they did, but I bet nobody’ll remember a one of these in five years, much less twenty.