Todd Snider – Viva Satellite

I believe Todd Snider’s an alright guy, and this is an alright album. Only thing is, it could have been a darn fine album if it wasn’t cluttered up by so much filler.

The first sign of weak material is a useless cover of a song that was fairly useless to begin with, Steve Miller’s “The Joker”. Who needs it? Then, by the end of the CD, some of the songs tend to be forgettable clunkers. “Never Let Me Down”, for instance, sounds like it might be at home on one of those Greg Allman solo albums where Greg’s trying to convince everyone that everything’s just fine.

Then again, when Snider and his band the Nervous Wrecks are on, they are really on, as with sublimely rocking tracks such as “Positively Negative” and “Out All Night” (their Tom Petty-ish nature aside). Snider devotees insist that his live shows are bonafide rock ‘n’ roll bacchanalias, and there’s definitely evidence of that here.

There are the obligatory echoes of Exiles On Main Street, hints of Skynyrd and the Allmans, nods to psychedelia, and a big shoutout to Led Zep in “I Am Too”, which contains what may be the best line on the album: “I wanna hit this town ’til its teeth come out.”

While Viva Satellite will surely enhance the Wrecks’ reputation as a crackerjack band, many of Snider’s fans were initially attracted to him for his clever lyrics in songs such as “Alright Guy”. The only overtly funny song here is the last cut, “Doublewide Blues”, a look at life in a trailer park. At first it might seem that the target is too obvious, that the jokes have already been done by a thousand standup comedians. Yet, in context with the rest of the album, “Doublewide” is a wry culmination. Viva Satellite is threaded with tales of out-of-control, unsupervised teenagers (“My mom works/My dad’s gone/I skip school here all day long,” he sings in “Rocket Fuel”) and the mind-numbing traps of the lower-middle-class life (In “Guaranteed”, he declares, “I have made my wish on a satellite dish.”)

With fewer silly exercises like “The Joker” and a tighter focus on the storytelling, Viva Satellite could have been a revelation.