Search - The Basics :: Private Drive

Private Drive

ragavatara | South Bend, IN | 04/10/2006

(4 out of 5 stars)

"Private Drive - the Basics



If you know where you're going, you can drive along a series of back roads in southern Michigan until end up at a secluded private drive. If you venture down this drive, you'll eventually come to the house that the Midwest-based band, the Basics, use as a sort of musical retreat. It's here that they get away from it all for a few hours every once in awhile to record the original songs that they've written.



Private Drive is the new album by the Basics. In many ways, it is itself a retreat from the conceptual tone of their debut album, Bitter/Sweet. While Bitter/Sweet seemed in large part to be about exorcising demons past and present, Private Drive is less conceptually focused. Not that that's necessarily a bad thing. On the contrary, with Private Drive the Basics have delivered a compelling set of superbly-crafted pop songs. If Bitter/Sweet was the Basics' "Sgt. Pepper," Private Drive is a "Revolver," or a "Rubber Soul."



While comparisons to the Beatles are typically overdone, the comparison to them here may be apt if only because Private Drive is so sprinkled with references to the Fab Four. Check out "A Train and a Room," which seems an exercise in trying to create a coherent song composed primarily of relatively obscure Beatle references. This might end up as a one-note punch line in the hands of lesser songsmiths, if only the tune weren't so damn catchy! Again, there's a pleasant surprise in the song, "Everywhere Man." A take off on the title of a Beatles song, it emerges a first-rate pop tune as well as an astute observation on the male psyche with regard to its pursuit of romance.



To listen to Private Drive, you'd have to come to the conclusions that the Basics aren't doing too well in the romance department. Love may be just out of reach in "Nothing But Time," perhaps in trouble in "Don't Tell the Moon" or gone completely awry with "Betty Brown," "Perfect," and "One Man Tells Another." It's a bit of an irony that the Monkees-inspired "Hold On Me," the track where the singer is the most enthusiastic about his prospects, is weaker than the songs about breakup and heartache.



One would be hard pressed to think that things are going that much better in the other aspects of the Basics' lives. The impressionistic "Rude Awakening," the self-incriminating "Damaged Man" and the garage band glorious "Walk Away Dead" all suggest a significant degree of existential angst.



A break from the tension comes in the form of a near-instrumental, "2/Night." The tune itself, along with its one-word lyric, suggests that everything may turn out alright - at least for a little while.



The playing and singing on Private Drive is clean and competent, simple and direct. The Basics aren't going to win any awards in any "guitar-slinger of the month" contest, but that's not what this album is about. It's about good songs and effective arrangements. You can get the impression that the Basics studied every moment of every track at each moment asked themselves how they could deliver on that song most effectively. Their well-honed sense of what makes for an effective recording keeps them from over-arranging their songs into sterile exercises.



If you know where you're going... you'll end up with Private Drive. It's well worth the trip.



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