Sadies – Favourite Colours

The Sadies look like the kind of badasses who started skipping classes in elementary school. Singer-guitarist Dallas Good comes across as the lifelong rebel who grew up smoking Lucky Strikes behind the portables, and you just know his bandmates were on a first-name basis with their principals.

But here’s betting that all four members of the Sadies paid rapt attention whenever the subject of music history came up in class. Favourite Colours finds them sounding like honor-roll students of classic country, flower-power folk, 1960s psychedelia, Dick Dale-issue surf, and 1980s post-hardcore. The band does a grade-A job of fusing such oft-disparate genres on its fifth and most rewarding release.

The mixing and mashing starts off with “Northumberland West”, an instrumental boasting the kind of fluid, peyote-damaged playing that made the Meat Puppets’ Up On The Sun an alternative landmark. From there, the Sadies, with help from such guests as Robyn Hitchcock and Calexico’s Joey Burns, seem hell-bent on making sure they don’t repeat themselves. Cold-fusing acid-freak-out guitar, backward-looped percussion, and Beatlesque horns, “Translucent Sparrow” is the sound of Sgt. Pepper shopping at Nudie’s Rodeo Tailors. The coal mine-dark “1000 Cities Falling (Part 1)” summons the spirit of Tennessee Ernie Ford, “Song Of The Chief Musician (Part 2)” recalls everything that was great about the Byrds, and the rolling-thunder instrumental “The Curdled Journey” has enough Ennio Morricone shot through it to make Clint Eastwood want to get back in the saddle.

The fevered genre-jumping doesn’t stop there. By the time the Sadies are done, they’ve given every indication they’d be as comfortable drinking with Uncle Tupelo as they would with Pete Seeger, the Replacements, Quentin Tarantino, and Andre Williams. Now that’s badass.