Jeff McCord on the month’s new releases
Rhett Miller
Verve Forecast
Rhett Miller’s innate talent and charisma have shone through the blazing cowpunk of the Old 97’s for more than a decade. His life seems a charmed one: He has kept his boyish good looks into his thirties; he’s married to a model. Clearly, it ain’t enough. The Dallas singer’s latest solo effort, The Believer (Verve Forecast), aspires to something more; it plays like an against-type bid for pop stardom. Tuneful yet empty power ballads, like “Fireflies,” pile up against the pallid pop schematics of “Meteor Shower” and, thankfully, a few loose-limbed rockers. It’s only on these tunes—“Singular Girl” and the Elvis Costello–like “Ain’t That Strange”—that Miller is in his element. Aspiring to a multifaceted career is one thing. Yet toss-off refrains such as “You gave me the reason/For feeling like I do” won’t get him there anytime soon.
The Glass Family
i eat records
Since the punk era, rock music has been mostly attitude. But attitudes have shifted, the ambient electronics of DJ culture have seeped in, and the music now seems just as much about mood. Austin newcomers The Glass Family are a prime example. Sleep Inside This Wheel (i eat records, available at ieatrecords.com) reaches for the prog-like keyboard-heavy edginess of Radiohead’s “Kid A” or, to go back even further, Pink Floyd. But the band skirts both pretension (unless you count the Salinger reference) and gimmickry, sounding, if not wholly modern, at least fresh. Employing a nonlinear pop sophistication probably weaned from Shins CDs, the band puts substance and surprise behind its sound, and vocalist Michael Winningham, hanging at the top end of his register, commands a sense of menace that makes the band’s debut seem even more compelling.
James Hand
Rounder
Besides working as a horse trainer, James Hand, from the tiny town of Tokio near Waco, has been haunting honky-tonks with his hard-won tales for more than thirty years. Suddenly, at 53, his on-and-off music career is decidedly on. The Truth Will Set You Free (Rounder), his first national release, is also his best. There’s some Lefty and George Jones in his music, but Hand is really a Hank devotee: He sings a bit like him, and his songs pack a similar emotional wallop. Wrenching, honest fare like “I’ve Got a Lot of Hiding Left to Do” and “If I Live Long Enough to Heal” will bury Hand’s days as an unknown—if enough people still crave the real deal. Hand himself sums up his anachronistic status when he claims that “they’ll run out of typewriter ribbon before I run out of songs.” Um, James … J.M.
