Old 97's: Satellite Rides : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

The curse of country rock is that its artistes take their inspiration less from country or rock than from the movies, where atmosphere is all, rural nostalgia is a given and the drummers all suck. The Old 97's are still a young band, but they've already outgrown their country-rock niche by ditching the cinematic approach of their peers for a lean, hungry guitar attack. Singer-songwriter Rhett Miller has always had a deft way with the one-liners, which he's displayed on all four of the band's previous albums. ("W-I-F-E" on 1995's Wreck Your Life is an indie classic ripe for rediscovery.) But while the Old 97's' acclaimed 1999 breakthrough, Fight Songs, was basically a Miller showcase, Satellite Rides has all the roar and crackle of a real-live bar band, a band that sounds experienced at drowning out hecklers and impatient to start knocking down doors, including yours.

Though the band started in Dallas, Miller later relocated to L.A., which lends an appropriately dislocated edge to his cowpunk tales. His subject is young love, his tone is insatiable melancholy, and yet he can bust out a valentine as openhearted as "Rollerskate Skinny," in which his invitation to romance goes, "Do you wanna meet up at the Picwood Bowl/We could knock nine down and leave one in the hole." Drummer Philip Peeples, lead guitarist Ken Bethea and bassist Murry Hammond juice the songs enough to keep corn at bay, even in desolate confessions like "Nervous Guy" and on "Buick City Complex," which comes on like the catchiest junkyard death trip since the Boss' "Cadillac Ranch." Satellite Rides holds up all the way through, but the Old 97's really hit country-rock nirvana in the expertly constructed cheatin' song "Designs on You." Miller sounds drunk and desperate four minutes before closing time, trying to sweet-talk a bride-to-be into one last tumble just so he can write another goddamn cheatin' song about her. The weird part is that you don't recoil from the creep in the song. You kind of like him. (RS 865)

ROB SHEFFIELD