Roy

Roy Killed John Train

(Lujo)

Record Review by Daniel Brody

What if you took an alt-country band and coated it thick with reverb, sharpening the loneliness of the music into a cavernous echo of mockery at your despair?  My Morning Jacket was in the process of answering that question before they got sidetracked, and Roy has arrived to pick up the slack.  All sorts of indie Americana sounds drift in and out of the album, from eighties R.E.M. jangle to lo-fi Pavement fuzz to Grandaddy knob twiddles; many of the songs mash these influences together in ways that defy verse-chorus-verse and smooth transitions.  It sounds like a road trip across America that just needed to happen, but slowly and sourly turns into the realization that most of open-road America is as stale and similar as the place you are escaping.

A mournful harmonica opens the album, sounding as if it is trapped at the bottom of a well.  The leadoff track, “Reno, I’m Coming Home,” listlessly takes stock of an unsatisfying life, with a guitar so distorted it sounds like a puddle.  The lyrics catalog forgotten high school buddies and dead-end nowhere town childhoods with the dearth of enthusiasm they deserve.  But it’s not all gloomy; the next track, “So Alive,” buzzes along to an insistent drumbeat and muffled four-track Sparklehorsey vocals, before morphing into monster grungey riffage two minutes in.  The song is a laundry list of unmet expectations and disappointments, but that doesn’t stop the band from noting that “It’s good to see you so alive.”  Victory in the face of unbearable blandness!  Other highlights include a dead-on, sloppily strummed portrait of you and your friends in “Neurotic Dive Bar Pirate,” and the warbly blues of the creepy “Hotel Congress.” 

Roy Killed John Train is a great album that synthesizes many of the loopy and lovable aspects of every rootsy alternative band of the past twenty-five years or so.  The vibe is loose and shaggy, and the record sounds like it was a blast to make.  The reverb will make you sad, the songcraft will delight you, and the lyrics will simultaneously make you sick with recognition and laughter.