Golden Smog – Another Fine Day

Nostalgia, like beer goggles, has a powerful distorting effect: Who wasn’t a little hipper, more fun and better-looking in the halcyon haze of our embellished memories? Nobody, that’s who. So consider this a caveat: Maybe Golden Smog wasn’t really all that great. They were just a bunch of guys goofing off, swapping songs and mugging. But give me 1995, Jeff Tweedy in a fishing hat, Gary Louris in shades, and a hometown crowd on a spring afternoon in St. Paul. Give me a sticky summer night at First Avenue in Minneapolis with the band vamping on “Spooky”, Kraig Johnson grinning and preening as a smoke machine belched and the swirl swallowed him up. That Golden Smog sure was easy to love.

They’d found a formula that wasn’t formulaic, a happy medium between the group’s entirely off-the-cuff beginnings as a schlock-rock & soul cover band with a singing roadie, and the great country-tinged rock songs the boys were writing in their various main gigs with the Jayhawks, Wilco and Soul Asylum. They put out Down By The Old Mainstream, an excellent record, but deflated the hype. “America’s Newest Shitmakers,” they called themselves. They rolled their eyes at the “supergroup” tag. More like stuporgroup, they joked.

When Weird Tales followed in 1998, it seemed like an afterthought, a sequel cooked up only because Mainstream was so unexpectedly successful. But the second disc held up; Johnson stepped into a larger role, and Louris uncorked “Until You Came Along”, an ideal vehicle for this phalanx of ragged voices and jangling guitars.

Eight years later, Louris has disbanded the Jayhawks and done some reunion gigs with original Jayhawk Mark Olson, in addition to facing down a grave heart ailment. Meanwhile, Tweedy became a bona fide rock star with Wilco, and Dan Murphy and Soul Asylum suffered the loss of one of rock’s good guys, founding bassist Karl Mueller.

All things considered, then, maybe we couldn’t expect another carefree Mainstream. But did we have to see Golden Smog turn serious? And boring?

Now maybe that’s too strong. Another Fine Day has its high points: Johnson’s giddy “5-22-02” strings its infectious falsetto choruses together with squiggling guitar lines and pulsing horns, while his “I Can” is a satisfying Beatles rip. The title cut filters a typically fine Louris melody and winsome vocal through Yankee Hotel Foxtrot-style sonic disruptions; his “Listen Joe” is a compelling acoustic elegy underlined by Tweedy’s plaintive backing vocal. Tweedy himself antes up “Long Time Ago”, the kind of mildly charming acoustic tune he could write while waiting for the toast to brown, and a low-key but winning reading of Dave Davies’ “Strangers”.

But just as nostalgia’s patina can be too forgiving, the cold light of reality is harsh. And in that light, the rest of these songs have far fewer hooks you’ll remember than maudlin cliches you’ll want to forget.

The blame, it seems, lies with the Jayhawks contingent. Louris, Johnson and Marc Perlman are chief songwriters on twelve of the disc’s fifteen tracks — including clunkers such as Louris’ “Beautiful Mind”, “Gone” and “Think About Yourself”, and Johnson’s “Frying Pan Eyes” and “Never Felt Before” — and they were the core of the band that assembled for a first recording session in Spain last year. (Tweedy and Big Star drummer Jody Stephens joined a second session in Minneapolis.)

All is not lost, however. Were this, say, 1976, the 64 minutes of Another Fine Day would be sprawled across a double LP with an airbrushed cover — just the sort of overstuffed turd the goofy Smog of old lampooned. Instead, it’s 2006, and technology has given us consumer schlubs new leverage. So slip ten bucks to an MP3 peddler and consign the forgettable tracks to the recycle bin. Burn Smog oldies “V” and “Radio King” to the same disc; call them bonus-track reminders of what used to be. Then turn on, play loud — and don’t forget the beer goggles.