Waco Brothers – Do You Think About Me / Jon Langford – Skull Orchard

The Waco Brothers put out the gnarliest of a more sentimental crop of roots rockers last year — twice, for good measure. Mostly a collection of outtakes, the ten-song CD Do You Think About Me was intended to be the kicker that last January’s Cowboy In Flames needed to land on year-end top ten lists. Its title track may nevertheless be the most memorable Wacos song ever, a hooky, horn-splashed everyman’s love song penned by Nashville’s Lonesome Bob.

Lest we forget whence came their name, the Wacos also summoned the 10,000-dunebuggy revelation of Neil Young’s carbine-laden trailer park guardians on the edge of town. The reggae lilt of Young’s original “Revolution Blues” is left eating their dust, and the hint of “Sympathy For The Devil” in the background vocals underscores the continuity of displaced disaffection over these 20-odd years, plus a millennium or two before them.

“Arizona Rose” is as close as the Wacos get to a ladies’ choice slow dance; “South Bend” is a heartaching tribute to those who know you can go home again, but it eats you alive to have to. The Waco Brothers/Clash connection is concrete in the “Hitsville, UK” sister city tune, “The Wickedest City In The World”, for which the background vocals provide a delightfully familiar landscape. “Napa Valley” will have living-room audiences worldwide singing along: “I’ve been drunk a thousand times/I would sober up, but there’s no reason.”

As busy as he is restoring heat to the flickering light of American country rock, Wacos troop leader Jon Langford has not forgotten his native Wales. To its plight he has dedicated the first record in his 20-year career to bear the imprimatur of his own name. He’s quick to credit others’ contributions, including harmonies and backing vocals by fellow Mekon Sally Timms, Drag City Records artist Edith Frost and the Texas Rubies’ Jane Baxter Miller; accordion by Mekon Rico Bell; rhythm and guitar by most of the Waco Brothers and former Bottle Rockets bassist Tom Ray; and others. Still, Langford wrote all the songs, spearheaded the production and plays organ as well as guitar.

Langford returns to Wales regularly enough to mark its decline from his youth. The songs on Skull Orchard expose this decay in the harsh light of his perpetually restless anger. Themes of urban blight and exploitation, established early on the CD with “Tubby Bros.”, “Penny Arcades” and “Butter Song”, slip inward mid-record, yielding to the resigned self-awareness of “Pill Sailor”, “Last Count” and “My Own Worst Enemy”.

In the first, a sailor relates his disorientation in the wake of dock closures in the town of Pill. With a hint of sea-chantey sway, the adventurer implores, “Tell me something I don’t know/And find me a skipper with someplace to go/’Cause these ropes are all knotted and tangled ’round me/I’m a sailor who wandered a little too far from the sea.”

“Last Count” is a loser’s anthem: “How many nights did I sit and drink ’til the big one slipped away?…So play another number/It’s only half past one/And I’m a fraction of the person/That you once counted on/At the last count my days were numbered, chalked up on the wall/At the last count there’s nothing I want at all…Well it’s 1-2-3, I’m fallin’/5-6-7, I hate myself.”

The message isn’t the whole story here. The infectious, soul-horned “I’m Stopping This Train”, for instance, spotlights Steve Goulding’s sheer authority over a groove, but tempos are mixed throughout, and with hints of Latin rhythms, blues riffs and even a flute solo, the songs rove as many genres as the Pill sailor has seas.

Most artists might float more than a year on an effort as strong as Cowboy In Flames, but they’d likely tour behind it, too, a length to which Langford and friends are loath to go. Fans outside Chicago jonesing for live shows will have to settle for this fine, new music.