A Drag City Supersession - Tramps, Traitors & Little Devils
(Drag City)
Drag City was in desperate need of a party band. King Kong may have an album coming out soon, but when you have to have a party, you have to have some way of getting a band together. A Drag City Supersession is the solution to all of Drag City's party planning problems. Don't form a band to play at parties, use the parties to form a band. Tramps, Traitors & Little Devils is the first album by the loose collaborative of Drag City artists which from now on will be known as A Drag City Supersession.
This session of the Supersession brings together ten songs, 6 originals and 4 covers. The originals were all penned by single songwriters, 2 each by Smog's Bill Callahan, Edith Frost's Edith Frost, and Royal Trux's Neil Hagerty. The four covers are of songs from Lou Reed, Randy Newman, some country songwriter, and BLACK SABBATH!!!!!!. (Sorry, I cannot just write "Black Sabbath" for when I start to write the word "Black," knowing I am going to write the word "Sabbath," it just comes out "BLACK SABBATH!!!!!!.")
Two of the covers "rule," and the other two covers "drool." "Charley's Girl," the Lou Reed cover, works well, Edith Frost singing with a more urban attitude, backed up by an entire chorus of Drag City stablehands. Slide and electric guitars are used to give the song a big dark cloud of noise to surround the singers. Speaking of a big dark cloud of noise, the BLACK SABBATH!!!!!! cover is, naturally, the most beautiful piece of music ever to come out on Drag City Records, and that includes those Vocokesh albums as well as everything from Neil Hamburger. Not since Metallica teamed up with the San Francisco orchestra has the hot metal so beautifully been combined with strings and reeds. Hagerty sings the song with suitable vitriol, not trying to ape Ozzy but still flowing and sounding abrasive. And who would have thought Lucifer, the song's topic, would end up being so polite? "My name is Lucifer, please take my hand." Lucifer says "Please"; what wonderful manners Satan has. The two bad cover songs are "The Girl on the Billboard" by old time country songwriters Walter Haynes and Hank Mills and "Old Man" by Randy Newman. The former is bad just because it isn't a very good song. Pure hobo music, I'd rather have them actually cover a King Kong song than cover an old song of the same style that isn't as funny or silly. The Newman cover suffers because the performance is too understated. Frost sings incomprehensibly soft, hidden behind the piano, and the string drone interlude seems poorly placed.
The original songs are not these songwriters' best material. Some interesting moments arise due to the collaborative nature of the recording, but the music and lyrics are mostly sub par. "Leaving the Army" is an odd metaphor for Frost to come up with, but the song is interesting in how it combines Frost's normal folk with e-bowed guitar and other more abstract noises from her compatriots. "Everyday" from Hagerty is a silly, upbeat song with a totally misused woodwind section and mismatched backing vocals from Frost. His "Texas Dogleg" is a bit more fun, but it is pure 1970s boogie rock, a style that is in many of these songs. "Zero Degrees" by Callahan is an adequate Smog song, but gains little from the other players.
The Supersession comes at an inopportune time. A new Smog album was just released. A new Edith Frost album was just released. The Neil Haggerty solo album is still quite fresh, as well. If, after you listen to your new Smog album and then listen to your new Edith Frost album, you want to hear some more songs from these artists, then I suppose the Drag City Supersession album is worth picking up. However, who has that kind of time? The album is more valuable for its novelty than its actual songs, fun to listen to a couple times but not of much lasting value.
Drag City's next objective: Get these guys on the next season of VH1's Cover Wars.
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