American Aquarium – The Fear of Standing Still
There was a book written about 13 rock bands from the 1980s called Our Band Could Be Your Life, all of whose fierce independence led to equally passionate loyalty from their fans. If you haven’t heard of Minutemen, Minor Threat, Big Black, Fugazi or Mudhoney, their music and apparel are only a click away, although without the social context of a time before you could click away and had to go to a record store to physically purchase their cassette.
Like many of those bands, in their 18-year career American Aquarium have never had a hit, with their biggest album Lamentations charting at number 133 on the US album charts during the Covid-19 pandemic. It was their second album on New West, a label which is home to a panoply of independent acts who eschew the major labels just as those rock bands of the 1980s did.
For this, their chief songwriter BJ Barham is a cult hero, and he is also free to pick a new band, as he did in 2019, who went on to back him on the terrific two-volume set of Slappers, Bangers & Certified Twangers that came out in 2021, as well as Chicamacomico in 2022. Their new album The Fear of Standing Still is their first to come out with distribution from Thirty Tigers, who have looked after acts like Sturgill Simpson and Jason Isbell. Shooter Jennings produces with his usual sensitivity to the singer and the song.
It is fascinating to see Lori McKenna and Hailey Whitters credited as writers on The Getting Home, a rock’n’roll dilemma where Barham adjusts to domestication while wondering ‘which one I’m putting first…When I’m home I miss the road, and when I’m on the road, I miss it all’. The title track picks up the same theme and quotes a child in the ‘Don’t go, please stay’ hook, as Barham rewrites the first verse and chorus of Even Though I’m Leaving by Luke Combs. Grab tissues.
There’s another dilemma on the album’s centrepiece Southern Roots, co-written by and with vocals from Katie Pruitt. Amid Springsteenish muttering about flags, Bible quotes and family trees, Barham’s language is excellent: ‘familiarity and fear intertwine’, ‘hate disguised as reverie’, ‘a great responsibility that comes with this geography’. This might be to separate him from those who, unlike bard Barham, did not leave town; after all, ‘you can only change the words that you choose’. But, our narrator realises, you cannot extricate yourself from where you were raised, and hence he is ‘replanting’ his roots.
Big Loud act Stephen Wilson Jr co-writes album opener Crier (‘the first thing we do when we’re born’) where, as a grown man, ‘dealing with our feelings is essential to survival’. There’s even a disguised Bible quiz, and well done if you know that ‘the shortest verse’ is ‘Jesus wept’. If you like bellowing prolix rock’n’roll sentiments like ‘The sermon of your tears are merely preaching to the choir’, Barham is the man for you.
The heartland rock feel of Crier is maintained in Messy As A Magnolia, a declaration of eternal love where the object of the narrator’s affection helps him ‘sweat the fever out’. On Piece By Piece, the twin marvels of love and sobriety are why ‘the windshield is bigger than the rearview mirror’.
The album’s third dilemma comes on Babies Having Babies, where Barham addresses the hot-button issue of abortion that America is unable to deal with: ‘they called her names while they called themselves Christian’ is a fine example of the poetic technique of zeugma, while the narrator wonders if the pair have spent $500 effectively and without damnation. It ranks alongside Two Pink Lines, The Pill and Red Rag Top in fine country songs about making the choice to have children or not.
The similarly slow-burning Cherokee Purples is a reminiscin’ song, complete with a rumbling organ, and Barham rhymes ‘aloe/tobacco’, ‘cicadas/tomatoes’ and ‘Mountain Dew or Big League Chew’. He goes over all Proust; even ‘something silly as a sandwich’ sets off a memory of a lady, or perhaps a girl, though the feelings are more important than identifying the person who inspires them.
Time is the theme of The Curse of Growing Old, where Barham remembers his dad crying over Dale Earnhardt (‘no star burns forever’) and how his grandma outlived so many of her friends and members of her family. He concludes that there is something scarier than death, ‘unavoidable change’, which comes off as a sermon on the mountain of rock’n’roll.
Ditto the album closer Head Down Feet Moving, where the pastor tells his flock that ‘the view up top is always worth the climb’. And addressing those people who make American Aquarium their life, ‘I’ll keep screaming out my secrets if you swear to sing along…If along the way I lose you, I appreciate you listening as long as you did.’ Amen to that.
The Red Clay Strays – Made by These Moments
Unlike American Aquarium, The Red Clay Strays have had a Hot 100 hit, charting at number 71 thanks to the virality of Wondering Why. Dave Cobb is in the producer’s chair for the major label follow-up to their crowdfunded independently released 2022 debut album Moment of Truth. They are from Alabama, the same state as former Cobb client Jason Isbell, and they know where to stick electric guitar passages and where to slow things down.
The album opens with Brandon Coleman’s Eddie Vedderish vocals, which on most of the album are saturated in studio echo, proclaiming on the track Disaster that he is ‘a music player…a young king walking’. Prophets, saints and sinners are on his mind, and this is music perfect for Red Rocks Amphitheatre in Colorado, or Shepherd’s Bush Empire, where the band are booked the day before they win new acolytes at The Long Road. They’re on the top line of the Saturday bill, the night after American Aquarium, and will offer charged rock’n’roll to complement the gentle melodies of Colbie Caillat.
The band have already sold out three dates at the Ryman in Nashville just after Labor Day, where it is hoped people won’t just show up to hear Wondering Why and talk though the rest of the set. The big single from Made by These Moments is Wanna Be Loved, a plodding bluesy call to be considered ‘worthy or important’ and for ‘someone to pick up the phone’; it has charted at both country and rock, which makes them akin to Hardy and Jelly Roll in riding two horses at once.
Wasting Time is a rock’n’roll anthem full of sound and fury, although the line ‘you gotta go do it on your own’ underplays the help of the ‘suits and ties’ of RCA Records against whom Coleman rages. I wonder if he thanked them for the advance to hire the services of Dave Cobb, or for getting the band on the soundtrack to the new movie Twisters. Rock’n’roll is artifice, anyhow; the trick is disguising it.
On the wordy chorus of No One Else Like Me, Coleman’s narrator calls himself a whole list of things including ‘a shadowed thinker’, ‘a dying ghost’ and ‘a restless fighter’ but above all he is, as per the title, unique. This will, ironically, appeal to thousands of similarly individual thinkers, which makes me think of when Monty Python’s Brian got a crowd to shout as one, ‘Yes! We are all individuals!’
Sometimes the lyrics are a bit Americana by numbers. We get the troubadour boogie Ramblin’, the storm-tossed woe of Drowning and the addict’s lament Devil In My Ear, where ‘depression and anxiety’ lead Coleman to self-medicate. Moments is banal (‘there’s joys and trials as you walk down every mile’) but has a beat you can sway to and a guitar part you can sigh to.
Much of the back half of the album is spiritual if not religious. ‘Sometimes I feel like I can’t feel’ is the opening line of I’m Stil Fine where the narrator believes ‘God’s not giving me up’. The Father returns on both On My Knees, which is driven by gospel handclaps, and the album’s closing track God Does: ‘Whatever I’m lacking it’s He who makes me whole.’
Perhaps the band are more in the lineage of Mumford and Sons than Jason Isbell, but there’s enough on this album to give people a great night of rock’n’roll and give RCA a return on their investment.
A Country Way of Life 