Search - Stan Ridgway :: Snakebite: Blacktop Ballads and Fugitive Songs

So good, it floored me.

Maine Writer | Maine, USA | 08/22/2004

(5 out of 5 stars)

"I've followed Stan Ridgway's career fairly closely, after having had the good fortune to catch a live Wall of Voodoo show in 1981. Let me say this without equivocation. This is Ridgway's best. Period. You can hear echoes of some of his older stuff in these songs, but, even then, it's an improvement. And rest assured, no record company would ever have approved this raw, ideosyncratic brilliance. Thank God for independent labels.



Some highlights: (1) You're Rockin' Chair sounds like a blues classic, with weird dissonance at all levels and near perfect lyrics: (2) Afghan Forklift is like Mark Knopfler meets H.P. Lovecraft meets ... well ... Stan; (3) That Big 5-0 is perhaps the best anthem for middle age I've ever heard--or is it??? I could go on, but trust me. This is as good as it gets."

"this world is old, and this world is mad"

R. Hutchinson | a world ruled by fossil fuels and fossil minds | 07/29/2004

(5 out of 5 stars)

"Stan Ridgway is back with another collection of brilliant vignettes, turning his unflinching eye on the dark side of the American Dream. It's a long one, 16 songs that fill the disc, and right up there among his best.



One of the things you might notice first is that several songs seem to address the demise of his old band Wall of Voodoo. "Talkin' Wall of Voodoo Blues Pt. 1," of course, but "Throw It Away," "My Own Universe" and "Classic Hollywood Ending" seem to be tied in as well. Two of the former band members recently died, and Stan is working through his pent-up feelings after all these years. Of these songs, "Classic Hollywood Ending" is an absolute knock-out, brilliant and moving.



Any Stan Ridgway record tends to be dark, with some dread looming, so the next thing you notice may be a little harder to pick out. 9/11 is an oblique presence -- how could it not be? "Afghan/Forklift," another of the album's strongest songs, features a forklift operator in Arkansas who notices two crates marked Top-Secret, headed for Afghanistan:



"Somethin' in the air, and it's movin' like a southbound train ... the shadows of an ancient flame burn away in time ... some will seek their god from a heaven in the sky, defendin' their affliction with a holy alibi..."



Stan also includes a fantastic cover of a 1969 Mose Allision song, "Monsters of the Id." A pointed comment on right-wing Neanderthals waving flags, it is a sad reminder of how things never seem to change. "Crow Hollow Blues," with Stan on banjo, sounds like an outtake from "Oh Brother, Where Art Thou?", from the point of view of a simple-minded but sympathetic prisoner who says "if we made a run fer it, we wouldn't get far." "That Big 5-0" is a high-energy potential hit single about hitting a big milestone on life's highway, something I expect most of us Stan fans can relate to. "Your Rockin' Chair" is a down and dirty blues number with slide guitar and a thinly veiled metaphor -- "the way you rock that chair with me just makes me want some more." "Wake Up Sally" and "King For a Day" are both vivid movie scenes, one about a young hoodlum and his girlfriend running from the law, and the other about a guy whose wife left him, doing an O.J. in a stolen car. There are a couple of tracks that don't work for me at all ("Runnin' With the Carnival" and "Our Manhattan Moment"), but that leaves 14 excellent songs. "God Sleeps in a Caboose" is another of SNAKEBITE'S best, a wistful reflection about "ridin' on that train," the train we all ride. It's the source of that great line -- "this world is old, and this world is mad."



Personally I think BLACK DIAMOND ('95) is Stan's best album of the '90s (see my 7/30/04 review). It still sounds every bit as good now as it did in '96 when I first heard it. Comparing SNAKEBITE to BLACK DIAMOND and ANATOMY ('99 -- see my 4/30/00 review), it didn't sound quite as powerful as their best moments at first. But I realized that the emotional power of great songs like "Mission Bell" and "Picasso's Tear" from ANATOMY are based largely on nostalgia and regret. SNAKEBITE sounds to me like Stan moving on, keeping up the good fight, creating a new reality, recreating his artistic vision. And we are fortunate that Stan is still singing his blacktop ballads and fugitive songs for all of us fugitives, rebels and idealists in this dark time as we barrel down the highway together."

Relaxed, perfect brilliance

Tankery | New Orleans | 09/01/2004

(5 out of 5 stars)

"I just got this a couple days ago, have listened to it maybe three times, and already find myself humming his new songs-Wake up, Sally and Throw it away stick, as do virtually all of them. Stan writes with a deadpan accuracy and quiet humor, and wraps these lyrics around and into perfectly produced, gorgeously rich collages of different instruments from flutes to fiddles to understated synthesizers.

Stan is the last of the best of those handful of early eighties alternative songwriters, who, in a more fair and reasonable musical climate, might share the same space in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as Dylan and Springsteen(It's poetic justice that ZZ Top and the likes are there instead).

Yet his canon of music is right there with Zevon, Lloyd Cole, and Frank Black, as genius songwriters with a smaller, but no less serious fan base.

This album overflows with a musical confidence, and has Mr. Ridgway crafting songs just as interesting and satisfying and fresh as Mexican Radio and Drive, She Said, from years gone by.



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