"Cowboy poetry" is one of those phrases you sometimes hear and don't know quite what to make of it. Odes to sagebrush and saddle sores, perhaps? But the music of the Old 97's, with its high lonesome sound, always felt like a kind of cowboy poetry to me. The Dallas-spawned band draws on country music to create something that's not quite alt-country — it's a smoother sound than, say, the grittier Uncle Tupelo or Whiskeytown.
Instead, frontman Rhett Miller uses the twangs and tropes of country music to create impeccable pop. Back in the 1990s, seeing them live felt like watching punk crash a rock concert at the grange hall — a thrilling and feisty clash of styles, all led by Miller's wide-open yearning voice.
Miller puts an urgency into his crooning laments, a kind of breathless impatience that gives the songs a jangly momentum. He's got a knack for great little turns of phrase. There's a line in "Doreen" off 1995's Wreck Your Life that still amazes me with its economical way of summing up one girl's life so far in a few words: "She lived in Berkeley till the earthquake shook her loose ... She lives in Texas now where nothing ever moves." It's a shame then that the band has never quite broken through to the mainstream, despite a string of great albums – you can't go wrong with Wreck Your Life or 1999's Kinks-like Fight Songs, in my book.
Miller took time off for a solo career which was less country, more pop, but after a bit of a hiatus the 97's of old are back with Blame It On Gravity, 13 songs of wistful romance that return to the country roots of the band's earliest work. Nearly every song is about the broken-hearted or the nearly so, yet Miller's crystalline voice always keeps a hint of optimism among the woe as the band swings between hoedowns and slow burners.
Article comments
1 - Tiffany Leigh
The woman you refer to lyrically off WRECK YOUR LIFE is actually "Victoria," not Doreen.