Widespread Panic: Til The Medicine Takes : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

Toiling in the trenches for more than a decade, Widespread Panic have made six sturdy records, developed a loyal audience through touring and even done a credibility-building side project (Brute, a 1995 collaboration with Vic Chesnutt). But no matter how far the Athens, Georgia, six-piece wanders, it seems forever stuck entertaining the Hacky Sacking masses on the quad with that trusty jam-band mix of endless two-chord vamps, shuffling and slightly funky backbeats, and forgettable song structures.

The John Keane-produced Til the Medicine Takes is the band's most deliberate attempt to shake that role. It's far more disciplined than anything else in the WP catalog, with songs that actually go places: "Climb to Safety" slides between engagingly introspective verses and an unmissable, king-size refrain about survival, while "Dyin' Man" laces polyrhythmic, hip-hop-style scratching into a riff on mortality sung with the earnestness of the early Grateful Dead. There's plenty of experimentation here, but it's subtle; the high-stepping, organ-spiked "Bear's Gone Fishin' " is a marvel of perpetual motion. At moments like that, when the band uses its easygoing grooves not as ends in themselves but as ways to energize its blunt melodies, you get the sense that Widespread Panic are really going somewhere. (RS 820)

TOM MOON