WHAT'S SO FINE ABOUT ART?:
What's So Great About the Old 97's?

by Rob Brookman

In a year whose pop-music pleasures have proved ephemeral at best, it seems that if the Old 97's didn't exist, it would be necessary to invent them. Almost three months after it arrived in the mail, the band's latest collection, Satellite Rides, continues to reveal itself as a blissful anachronism -- a song album by a song band in a bad time for song albums and song bands. Sandwiched among the portentous sound experiments that pass for alt-rock these days (hello, Sigur Ros), head 97 Rhett Miller and his mates make simple specificity appear visionary, and tried-and-true pop-rock look like the Next Big Thing. It's not, of course, and the kids who make up the bulk of the record-buying public know it. But it's a testament to Miller's faith in old-fashioned songcraft that a CD that would have sounded at home in 1985 or even 1965 has a lot of people who bought the thing handicapping it for album of the year here in 2001.

What's great about Satellite Rides is partly that "great" is last thing it seems to aspire to. Unlike, say, the overheated Thom Yorke, the boys in the Old 97's aren't out to recast modern music in their own image. More often than not, Miller's tunes are homely display racks he fills with his smart little vignettes about love and its vagaries. The hooks are utilitarian even when they transcend utility -- they're there chiefly so you'll remember the words. On the new record, he one time the music threatens to call attention to itself by spinning off the road, Miller reels it in by confessing a bad feeling that a beloved book of poems is probably not up to the job of saving his romance. Even the buoyant opener, "King of All the World," is brought down the to earth by a qualifier, as in "you make me feel like I'm the." And the playing and production mirror that diffidence. No chest beating solos, flashy fills, trippy tape loops or sampled atmospherics here. After all, these guys want to be your pals, not your gods; pray to Radiohead if you're looking for a higher power.

But just because they're simple doesn't mean they're simps. Underestimate Miller, his band or his record and they'll get to you from the inside out. You'll notice that, even though you've played the record once -- and maybe just in the background -- fragments of it leap from your subconscious at the oddest times. Maybe it's that irresistible descending chorus that goes "I'd be lying if I said I didn't have designs on you" over and over again or the way Miller nearly overruns the words "book for poems" on his way to the next verse or the way the harmonies over the I.D. line in "Nervous Guy" imply not just nerves but a touch of psychosis, too. You hear the Flying Burrito Brothers and then the Replacements, Marshall Crenshaw and Hank Williams, the Beatles and Buddy Holly -- but never explicitly. Miller keeps his influences in his bloodstream, not on his sleeve. Give him a couple more listens, and he might just convince you that simple is never as simple as it sounds.

Another thing that makes Satellite Rides so great is that, just a few years ago, it looked so unlikely. Before 1999's Fight Songs, the Old 97's were pretty much like the rest of bands flogging the alt-country horse -- kids whose confusion, romantic and otherwise, was too damn inchoate to put in front of loud electric guitars and a rock and roll backbeat. If they showed glimpses of greatness -- the one-night-stand sing-along "Barrier Reef" being a notable example -- remember, fleeting snippets of talent do not great albums make. Fight Songs was their coming-out party and I didn't think they'd top it. At the time, I summed up the album thusly: "The air of doomed relationships never overwhelms the pure joy of four guys stretching their chops and ripping through what may well prove their masterpiece." In retrospect, though, it's a self-conscious, willful kind of masterpiece; Miller doesn't seem to comfortable trusting his band to hit the heights he's aiming for, and although every tune eventually sticks, they don't sound of a piece.

Satellite Rides, on the other hand, sounds different -- confident, relaxed, and above all, democratic. It's a band record where the previous work was a songwriter showcase. And as a result, it achieves the one goal Fight Songs failed to reach: it coheres as a song suite. Maybe after venturing out on some solo dates a year or so ago, Miller realized that he needed his band as much as they needed him, that if he was going to make good on the promise of Fight Songs he needed to, as they say, give the drummer some. Whatever. It suits the work, and makes Satellite Rides an even more satisfying listen than its still-excellent predecessor.

I'm glad that Fight Songs wasn't the 97's high-water mark, and I'm even happier that the band has evolved to the point where Satellite Rides may not be, either. The Old 97's and their terrific little album are a reminder that what's so fine about art (to quote "Barrier Reef") is that the best of it isn't always so fucking fine. Sometimes it's enough just to hear a nervous guy fronting a band that loves pop for pop's sake, the Next Big Thing be damned. And that means, in a year when the pop-music landscape seems thoroughly divided between bloated stabs at capital-m meaning and utter disposability, we might need a contented centrist like Rhett Miller more than he needs us.

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