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Cordelia's Dad - Road Kill

Bryan H. Sherrod | Dallas, TX | 07/03/2005

(5 out of 5 stars)

"With the release of "road kill", their fifth album, Cordelia's Dad exorcise the folk-rock spectre that has haunted them since the beginning of their career. Simply because this spectacular trio has drawn upon the richly snaggle-toothed ballads of Appalachia and New England as source material, it has been nigh on impossible for writers to describe them without referring to the "f" word. Rather than operating in a folk tradition, however, Cordelia's Dad have always taken their material on loud rides into the eye of the pulsing unknown. Their best work has always been draped in feedback and propelled toward an indistinct future. And "road kill" represents some of their very best work, consisting of entirely self-penned work and presenting the band's loudest and least traditional-based outing yet.



If you're interested in hearing what they used to be like, their first two studio albums are scheduled for reissue around the time this comes out. "road kill" does not look back. It takes songs that share connective tissue with the best that misery-based "trad" songwriting has to offer, and shoots them out of a cannon. Distortion, feedback, exhausting propulsion and bad attitude are all elements that surface on "road kill". It presents Cordelia's Dad in a raw state that may surprise some people who know them only by reputation. For those more fully conversant with their work, this is a natural extension of the band's most recent recordings and live shows.



Recorded live on stages across the United States, "road kill" presents Cordelia's Dad at their most trad-destructive. Their essential core is unchanged. Their songs are still concerned with love and death and disease and tragedy and death and love. But the brutal vector that the band follows through their material makes it obvious that their most applicable tag now reads: post-punk psychedelic power trio. The voltage on "road kill" is at a level that was only hinted at at the end of Cordelia's Dad's last album, "Comet". If they continue at this pace it will only be a matter of moments before the wags start writing things like, "They make Nirvana sound like goddamn Peter, Paul &Mary". Perhaps John Peel said it best when he was recently queried about Cordelia's Dad by a British "f" magazine concerning their peers. "Richard Thompson my black ass," spat the legendary disc jockey. "Cordelia's Dad are the real Husker Du"."