Sound Check — Geoff Carter: Re-examining insurgency in field of country music

Friday, Jan. 21, 2000 | 9:05 a.m.

Geoff Carter's music column appears Fridays. Reach him at carter@ vegas.com

"Insurgent" country music ain't what it used to be. Two years ago it was the last, dim hope for modern country music. Last year it became the last, dim hope for modern rock and roll and country alike. Nearly every artist under the "insurgent" (nee "No Depression," "Americana," "alt.country") banner made 1999 a year of growth, of breaking those invisible ranks.

Wilco hung up their spurs and grabbed Brian Wilson's surfboard to make the exquisite "Summerteeth." Steve Earle turned down his amps to make a pure bluegrass album, "The Mountain," with the Del McCoury Band. These artists were never comfortable with being relegated to the alt.country movement in the first place; they're not of the sort to join clubs or jump bandwagons.

Neko Case is a prime example of that proud division. "I don't like being pigeonholed," the Vancouver-based singer-songwriter said in a 1998 interview. "I don't play 'alternative country' music; I just play country music. I want to have the same outlets, the same goals that all my heroes in country/western music have had." She added that her next album would be another step toward those goals; that it would bust the alt.country proscenium.

She was right. Neko Case and Her Boyfriends' "Furnace Room Lullaby" is to the band's previous record, "The Virginian," as a banana split is to a banana -- it's the same good stuff, just more of it.

From the first, sustained notes of "Set Out Running," "Furnace Room Lullaby" presents itself as a country record in the grand tradition, all Loretta Lynn and Carter/Cash; the only thing that marks it otherwise is the very funny, very dark cover art. (I guarantee you, if Shania Twain presented herself as a freaking corpse on her next album cover, it would raise more than a few eyebrows.)

Case's voice, eager and plaintive, stirs your heart. On "Porchlight," buoyed by a cooing, multitracked vocal more reminiscent of the Cocteau Twins than anything else in memory, she takes several time-worn country music benchmarks -- life on the road, that eternal need for forgiveness -- and imbues them with such passion and conviction that they become your own desires, your own needs.

She can turn a neat original phrase, too. "Leave me the check, and I'll pay with the rest of my life," she declares in "Twist the Knife." Messy breakups have seldom been better described. Or is she talking about how she got into the condition pictured on the album cover, breathless in the most literal sense? Her ambivalence is as clever as it is wicked.

The Boyfriends, a hand-picked outfit drawn from the cream of Vancouver's talent pool -- the next Nashville, I tell you -- is as brilliant a backing band as I've ever heard. Former Shadowy Men on a Shadowy Planet guitarist Brian Connelly could more or less shape the lovely ballad "No Need To Cry" into a fully-formed number all by his lonesome; Case's tender vocal just frosts a very sweet cake, albeit one with a hacksaw inside.

The Bottle Rockets don't bother to conceal that sharp edge. The Festus, Mo., band has stripped itself of every last country accent to make "Brand New Year" -- a straight-up barroom rock record ideally suited to shooting pool, driving fast and getting plastered.

Singer/songwriter Brian Henneman tips the band's hand early on, growling "I'm alone in bad company"; only a guy who professed his desire to make classic rock for a new generation to Time magazine would dare to name-check the one band that made roughly 50 percent of what you hear on classic rock radio.

The other tracks follow suit: a sexy tribute to "Nancy Sinatra," "Helpless," a snarling indictment of the information age, and the humble boozehound's anthem "The Bar's on Fire" ("Somebody save the beer!") all rock with the familiar swagger of ZZ Top, Lynyrd Skynrd and yes, Bad Company.

The tracks are ready-made for truck stops and strip joints. To listen to "Brand New Year" is to let yourself drift, completely unaware, into one of those establishments -- the mark of true, dirty genius. The country can wait, champ -- we're going to the big, big city, in a car loud enough and mean enough to scare everyone else clean off the road.