The Jayhawks: Blue Earth : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

The Jayhawks' 1989 second album -- following their little-heard debut, The Jayhawks -- finds the Minnesota band discovering its Far North twang. Sometimes called the seminal work of the alt-country movement that would flourish in the early Nineties, Blue Earth is revolutionary only in its filigreed simplicity -- a delicate stomp delivered with a sweetness so foursquare it seems almost innocent. These fifteen well-carpentered songs (the reissue includes three bonus tracks) are the sound of a bar band breaking through to the next level. Falling somewhere between experience and affectation, these wintry tales of lost love and lost hopes have a lonesome-prairie bleakness, full of long black dreams, valleys that can't be crossed and crumpled dollar bills.

WILL DANA
(From RS 922, May 15, 2003)