Asylum Street Spankers: My Favorite Record : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

Asylum Street Spankers' My Favorite Record is like a variety pack of cereal: It's got all flavors, and some are sweeter than others. This band of musical overachievers strings together entertaining tongue-in-cheek tunes, from Dixieland to alt-country to waltz. The zanier 20s-/30s-era songs work best, like "Monkey Rag," bursting with jug-band bravado, and with the speakeasy spookarama "Insane Asylum," all jangly blues and Tom Waits-ish vocal strolls. ASS boldly cross musical boundaries, with mixed results. The songs tend to feel unrelated to each other and uneven. The agenda sometimes seems indecisive: at odds between parodying genre and showcasing musical prowess, not always committing to either ("My Favorite Record" starts as a jazzy rag, only to lose itself in experimentation). However, crossing boundaries does make for beautiful surprises -- "The Minor Waltz," a complex oompah serenade, is a glorious instrumental standout -- and it breeds lines like "I was born in New York City and beat up down in San Anton'," an apt metaphor for this collection and for an era in which city-slick Gen Y's are getting jiggy with Ralph Stanley.

ROBIN AIGNER
(SEPTEMBER 25, 2002)