O my sweet little Davenport, what happened to you? How could you let me down like this? 2005 was such a great year for you. Tongue of Bear, The Hands of Worm Heaven, Rabbit's Foot Propeller, and your self-titled LP on Not Not Fun are all new classics. You gave us all of those plus a slew of solid cassette and lesser CDR releases. But this? Free Country? How could you make this your first "real" CD release? What went wrong?
Here's the deal: Free Country is a reissue of a super-early self-titled CDR (no relation to the LP) on Foxglove, bolstered with some extra tracks. The most infuriating thing about this album is how good it could be. The title track and "The Light Ahead, The Dead Fields Behind" are both solid 'Port tracks. "Psychededlic Underground" is one of Davenport's best tribal slowbuilds. "Taking On The Rails" is one of the most gorgeous things ever to come out of the Family. "Hymn to Broken Neck Bone" is an awesome solo Ruby noise piece. We even get to see them focus their songwriting on "Thou Shall Be Waking" and "Play It Once, Sam," the former being one of the album's weaker moments with its poor group vocals and the latter being one of the highlights; a disjointed and imploding country road playing itself out in front of you. Opener "Joy! By Numerals Act" could easily be one of my favorite Davenport tracks; all drones and groans and outdoor ambience. But the mood is ruined midway through the track by the inclusion of back-country vocal sample. Not that it's not an interesting sample or that it couldn't have worked wonderfully in another band's song. However, I come to Davenport for blood rituals and dirt and you'll never see everyone gathered around a flame for a ritual, drums and bones in their hands, the lone guy waiting for his turn to push play on the tape recorder. Both "The Crowned and Conquering Children Dirt Pour" and "Sensations in Sound" go absolutely nowhere. That fact that they weren't on the original CDR coupled with their extremely uninteresting natures make their inclusion on Free Country mindboggling. This is a long album without them, it doesn't need the padding anyway.
But then we come to the album's most horrid offering: "The Fool's Organ." It starts innocent enough with organ drone and sparse guitar over a timid conversation. But then it becomes the strangest song in Davenport's catalog. Yes. The most out of place, out of nowhere song I've heard quite possibly ever, the song turns into a hyper-cheesy organ and drum machine dirge that lasts for 6 of the song's 8 minutes. Do you want to know how bad it is? It makes me think of the music from Napoleon Dynamite. Can you believe that shit? And, again, this wasn't on the original CDR.
The only song I would've cut from the original is "Thou Shall Be Waking" but it's not horrible and is certainly forgivable from a musical stand point and even more so from an archival one. But the only track on Free Country that wasn't on the original really worth keeping is "Psychedelic Underground." As an album, the bad tracks completely wreck the momentum built by the good ones (hell, "The Fool's Organ" could probably wreck the album by itself), but there are great songs here. The key to getting anything out of Free Country is not treating it like an album but treating like a rarities collection, which it basically is, where duds are a little more forgivable. It's just disappointing that this had to be Davenport's highest profile release to date and one of their weakest at the same time.
