NETRHYTHMS.COM
UNITED KINGDOM
RECORD REVIEW
July 2003

Whether the second solo album from the former Son Volt/Uncle Tupelo man actually needs the short spacey electronic instrumental interpassages he's called Space Junk I-VI is open to question, but there's no question that the songs around them are indispensable stuff.

Taking its title from the French for soil, a deeply complex term that embraces the relationship between man and nature to create so much more than just earth, it's also a nod to his St Louis home and its rich meeting of musical crossroads. Taking his touchstones from revolver and Tonight's The Night, the album blends its Americana folk with country and blues, the core line-up of pedal steel, slide guitar and piano evoking a landscape that's both bleakly harsh but soulfully warm.

The clattering blues of "Fool King's Crown", one of the more politically barbed tracks, is atypical and really stands out like a sore thumb amid a mood, much inspired by his father's death, that's ruminative, restless, concerned with memory and the need to avoid repeating the mistakes of the past. Two songs make direct reference to his dad, the keening "Hard Is The Fall" with its line about him shaking Hank Williams' hand and the piano based "Dent County" where he contrasts his father's time in the Merchant Marines with the family roots in the Ozark mountains.

The stripped down, plaintive approach fills the heart too on the wistful "Out On The Road" its lonesome flute underscoring his words as he talks of finding your pain while the cello that colours "Cahokian" brings added melancholy to the song's concern with history - specifically Mississippi history - doomed to repeat itself.

In many ways an emotional concept album as Farrar looks to the past and wonders, as on "No Rolling Back", what it holds for the future, it's an album that grows and lingers and seems certain to become a landmark release in his journey down the Americana road. It also comes with a handful of alternative versions, different roads taken, of four of the songs, bringing a more dirt country flavour to "No Rolling Back" and "Hanging On Toy You", stripping the sound back even further to almost minimalist proportions on "Heart On The Ground" and, in a feat that seemed impossible, making "Hard Is The Fall" sound even more haunted and forlorn than the first time round.