You don’t need The New York Times to tell you alt-country is dead and cremated; that’s old news, but it still doesn’t play well in the fly-over bars and basements. And there’s apparently no mourning yet in Vancouver, British Columbia, where Ox turn their second album into a weed party for the strung-out emotions and sonics of mid-’70s Neil Young and the Burrito Brothers — and all the personal and political decay those references imply.
“Miss Idaho” and “747” may sound like the best Whiskeytown songs you’ve never heard — owing in part to songwriter Mark Browning’s raspy, soulful moan — but the lyrics give uniquely fractured insights on Americana burnout and increasingly harder drugs and truths. Cheap Trick’s “Surrender” serves as an emblem of the record’s themes — sex, dope and war — and as ideal fodder for a lope-along acoustic groove, while Woody’s “1913 Massacre” is ideal in and of itself, best conveyed with a single, fearful voice and guitar. “Sugar Cane” is just a catchy country love song, beautiful because it never pretends to be more that.
At times, the idealized amateurism implied by the album’s title gets the better of the band’s talents. On “Marta’s Song”, they turn the mike and piano over to Marta Jaciubek for a stoned-as-bats-and-half-as-tuneful “medley” including “Happy Christmas (The War Is Over)”. “Country Music Promoter” satirizes radio shills a la “Drug Store Truck Driving Man”, but Browning’s tortured southern accent just turns the irony back on himself.
Ox has wit, tunes, honesty and all the vintage reverb they need. Their next acquisition should be a sharper sense of purpose.
