Rescued from the Junk Drawer of my Heart
J. Burns | South Carolina, USA | 12/27/2008
(5 out of 5 stars)
"Just when I began to think Antsy McClain was producing predictable musical comedy with Trailercana, he surprised me with quirky material of...substance...in New Good Old Days...from the rollicking Cajun-flavored Right Side of the Dirt to his twangy cover of The Cars Let the Good Times Roll. Antsy melds golden vocals and his signature pickin'-around-the-kitchen-table-style acoustic guitar with big horn arrangements and an upright saloon piano sound. Get past the insightful-if-seventh-grade- humor of The Bathroom Songwriter and you will find gems tucked away in this music.
Twitchin' (That's What I Do) features jazzy horns and the best saxophone solo I've ever heard. Baritone sax is like bleu cheese. A little goes a long way. This song is loaded with bleu cheese and carries it off without stinking. It's paired with stellar lyrics from the up side of bipolar. I want to go down in flames with all my gauges on empty, too. The big horn arrangements carry over into the campy Jenny's Jungle Room, an up tempo piece that calls to mind mod miniskirts and go-go boots. Jenny is so good the song needs to be at least two verses longer and it begs for some bluesy black female background vocals a la Gimme Shelter.
McClain's signature humor shines like a hole in a Sixties folksinger's britches in The Last Man on Earth To Get the Cooties , a Dylanesque number. Forlorn and funny, Last Man showcases things you'd never think you'd hear in a pop song, such as the use of the noun booger and things that rhyme with Nacogdoches. The closing song, a rootsy if this ain't The Big Time what is? will bring a tear to your eye.
My favorite track is the pared down A Life Like Ours. The optimistic undercurrent of this CD is distilled in this track: Somewhere past these gravel roads, high on a castle's tower/A rich man dreams of paradise and sees a life like ours.
If there is a fault in this album, it is the cursory appearance of comedy (a clever The Blah Blah Song) and unimaginative arrangments of background vocals. The treasure is in the lyrics. Antsy rescued me from The Junk Drawer of My Heart with insight and folksy philosophy.
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