By FS Slim
Songs of intrepidity and irresponsibility sound the same no matter the form. This is, in fact, the risk you take when you decide it’s time to pin your stories to the backs of artfully irresponsible, intrepid-type characters. Let your tale go the way of road grog and wanderlust, and sure enough, some loveless fleabag will appear out of the bushes behind your apartment, mixing for you a lurid cocktail of metaphor, boot savvy, and hemlock so to memorialize the way your music sounds: as slick, old, and dead as a beat.
Far be it from me, however, to ignore the fact that when a road-weary critic decides to write up a band – namely Boxcar Saints who performed on Jan. 8 at Bottom of the Hill – for its use of American cliché becomes not only a trader in kind but also an enormous killjoy.
But I’m tired too – tired of hitchhiking back and forth from Santa Cruz to the Upper Haight, listening to the same tired tunes on a white plastic juke half stuffed into a green bandana: little white lies connecting me to the end of my REI walking stick. I should be setting my snares for fuzzy animal things or finding Motel Burningman at the Holiday Inn in Burlingame. I tire at my use of irony, your use of irony, and all the meta-irony that our collected ironies generate when their avatars meet on the great desert train car of virtual-virtual experience.
So, leaving irony’s bequest behind us, at last, we get to some honest talk from the hobo’s mouth about the Boxcar Saints: these guys suck at least as much as this review. Without mentioning certain pretensions en vogue (like the giving of separate names to your side projects, who open for you and your other sideprojects, when your side projects are really just different instrumental configurations of your band’s original membership), the stuff does seem self-fulfilled, which is a nice way of saying the bass lines show no room for growth, the lead guitar is in most ways predictable, the writing has all been heard, seen, and done before. Call me another panning San Franciscan, it’s OK, but hey how ‘bout that ride to that party in the South Bay?