Plain Recordings
Various artists : "You can never go fast enough" (var,2003)**'
Filippo Salvadori compiled this after spending some time organizing and asking around for tracks as a tribute to the road movie "Two-Lane Blacktop". Having seen some of my favourite guitarists on it I did not need much time to decide to trace it. Not knowing the movie I can only judge the CD for its music and for what is my own impression of an American road movie. I saw only some road-movies. "Paris-Texas", for instance, another combination of movie and guitar music that struck me and many other movie fans.
Hearing the tracks of this album I heard a deadly melancholic loneliness, as well as a very American feel throughout most of the album. My favourite tracks here are Sandy Bull's "Little Maggie", a perfect American styled inspired banjo fingerpicking track, Calexico's "No Doze", and Suntanama's "Parallels", with a fresh and rewarding band sound,.. Except for Calexico, which sounds very lonely, with acoustic fingerpicking and electric slide guitar and drums, my preferred tracks were the more clear, and uplifting ones with a lighter sound. Most of the album is not light. For a fluent listening experience it lacks some coherency, but as conceptual mood creation in general it's compiled very consequently. The switch from the first track of the technically crafty Sandy Bull however to the depressed Will Oldham is rather big. I found such a sudden change difficult to listen to. The Will Oldham track works on its own, describes filmicly, with narration ; the band sounds nice, but the track still has a boring production, for almost 9 minutes. Alvarius B's track of a guitar improvisation is extremely melancholic too, but this time it sustains the basic feel of the album. Also Steffen Basho-Junghans succeeded in describing the American downtrodden feel very well, in his own original style (with acoustic slide guitar). Never the less this particular doomy American feeling I personally can not find myself getting into it very much. It's a kind of hopelessness, directing forward without many perspectives and visions. Beside the already mentioned tracks we hear also two old American songs, one by Roscoe Holcomb, and one by Leadbelly (both earlier published by 'Smithsonian Way'), an American styled song by Wilco, a third grade urban experimental track by Mark Eitzel & Marc Shapelle, a Giant Sand instrumental with some unclear musical perspectives, a Charalambides track sounding like afterlife rock, followed by a fine but somewhat long experimental Sonic Youth instrumental track based upon loops, slow electric guitars, bowls ?, called "loop cat", fitting nicely with the Charalambides track. 'Cat Power' is a female singersongwriter with guitar with another ok / nice track, in an urban mood. It sounds like a song with some personal introspective over something with no perspective. The last 13 minutes are psychedelic guitars from Roy Montgomery, in the mood of a "back on the road again", completely stoned and with mind blanked. If all these loaded and cloudy feelings should be an example for a life's vision, we will never see the light. With lights out, heading down the road you can never go fast enough. The indifference of its nature has no limitations in time(s perspective). These expressions only fill up the empty goal which started off at first. For every visionless victim of this society, this is describing live for what it is not.
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