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Jay
Farrar - Terroir Blues
Since Jay Farrar came of age as a songwriter and performer at the same time -- and in the same band (Uncle Tupelo) -- as compadre Jeff Tweedy, it's hard not to chart the two musicians' career progress on a single graph. With Terroir Blues, Farrar zigs where Tweedy and Wilco zagged on their most recent offering (2002's Yankee Hotel Foxtrot), stepping away from the complex (and sometimes convoluted) arrangements that marked 2001's Sebastopol and back into the rustic campfire warmth of his earliest work. The album's title isn't a political screed; "terroir" is a French word referring to the soil and climate that spawns a particular kind of crop -- appropriate, given the rooted nature of the disc's best songs. The hauntingly spare "Cahokian" finds Farrar musing about the mysteries of the Native American burial mounds around his Missouri home; "Dent County" pays homage to his late father, whom Farrar conjures as a force of nature in his own right. Farrar has made no secret of his reverence for Neil Young, and that icon's influence shows up here in several ways, most obviously on the feedback drones -- all of which are titled "Space Junk" -- that pop up at odd intervals throughout the disc. In another tip of the hat to ol' Neil, Farrar reprises a passel of Terroir Blues's electric songs in acoustic form, a trick that adds a poignant undertone to "Hanging On to You" and an inexorable weightiness to "Hard Is the Fall." It's the sound of a man speaking softly and carrying songs that stick -- in a very big way. David Sprague |
