GIVE BACK MY TV; IT DON'T MEAN THAT MUCH TO ME: Hi, me again, another review of an album for the Best Album
of 1993 bracket-style tournament. Follow
@bestalbum1995 and vote for your favorite albums, unless they are matched up
against PJ Harvey’s Rid of Me!
Perhaps, in 1993, you were 23 years old, and your friends
invited you to a weird club (which you called the United Nations, because of
its semicircle-tiers-of-tables setup) in a weird sleepy neighborhood to see a band
on the rise touring their newest album.
If so, that band, and that album, would imprint itself on your
mid-twenties. It would become the
soundtrack to road trips, to drunken camping trips, to the breakup of a couple
of your best friends. You’d later form a
band with one of the guys who invited you to the concert; your drummer would,
coincidentally, have taken drum lessons from that other band’s drummer; and you’d
cover one of the songs from the album during messy, noisy practices in dim
basements. At the concert, the band wore
cowboy hats and ripped through tight versions of their songs, cover songs, and
old standards, all sounding suspended somewhere closer to the twangier side of
a wire tethering 70s folk-country to early 90s garage rock. They’d pause for long stretches between
songs, trading instruments with each other and with a harried roadie. The two singers barely looked at each
other. They finished with a cover of
Neil Young’s “Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere,” and they broke up within
months.
That was Uncle Tupelo, and the album was Anodyne. Uncle Tupelo had earlier invented the country-punk
(though, really, neither) movement called No Depression with their album
entitled, ahem, No Depression, and whatever that was, they perfected it with
their perfect March 16-20, 1992, a combination of originals and standards whose
hasty assembly manages to convey intimacy and urgency. Anodyne was to be Uncle Tupelo’s
breakthrough, like Nevermind was Nirvana’s and Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain was
supposed to be Pavement’s. Every song on Anodyne
is great or close to it. There are
Jay Farrar mopes ("Anodyne"; "Slate"); genuinely sad Farrar breakup epics (“High
Water”; “Steal the Crumbs”); combative romps (Farrar’s “Chickamauga”; Tweedy’s “New
Madrid”); and genuinely funny tunes (Tweedy’s “Acuff-Rose” and “We’ve Been Had”). Plus, there’s the so-seventies-country-it-might-be-parody
“Give Back the Key to my Heart,” which you just kind of have to hear. This is just a great collection of
pop-folk-country-rock, a great band’s swan song and the No Depression version of the Beatles’ Let it Be. I don’t think it’s
the greatest album of 1993, but to me, it’s top-5, maybe top-3. Don't let it lose to, like, Counting Crows or James, please.
