Music
Pinmonkey Big Shiny Cars (Back Porch)
Playing March 14 at the Western Beat Roots Revival
Even more than most styles of pop music, country-rock shivers with a formalist chill. The monuments of the genre—the Byrds’ Sweetheart of the Rodeo, Gram Parsons’ Grievous Angel, the Everly Brothers’ Roots—add real passion to the mix of Bakersfield honky-tonk, country and bluegrass harmonies, and British-Invasion pop that went into its formation. But groups like Poco, Pure Prairie League, Firefall and The Eagles, accomplished as they are, give up mostly surface pleasures. The Eagles of “James Dean” and “Take It to the Limit” are skillful pop musicians; the Eagles of Hotel California are impossibly tedious social critics.
This is a fancy way of saying that the concerns of the world don’t often enter into the world of country-rock, and that when they do, the music that results is usually just as confused as any other pop. Still, formalism has its merits as well as its limits, and if Pinmonkey’s new Big Shiny Cars stands as one of the most accomplished country-rock records in recent memory, it also operates in a world—not quite pop, not exactly country—that can seem too small.
Fronted by the Virginia-born singer and songwriter Michael Reynolds, Pinmonkey (named after an episode of The Simpsons in which Homer expresses a desire to work as a bowling-alley pinsetter) emerged in 2002 with the independently released Speak No Evil. The album contained originals along with songs by the Carter Family and Gillian Welch. Later that year, the album Pinmonkey yielded a country hit in “Barbed Wire and Roses,” an intriguing mixture of bluegrass and what could almost pass as Louisiana swamp-pop.
Pinmonkey showcased a versatile group who wrote good songs and chose even better ones. Reynolds’ “Jar of Clay” was neo-bluegrass in the manner of Dolly Parton, who contributed a harmony vocal on the group’s cover of her song “Falling Out of Love With Me.” Gwil Owen’s “Augusta” made the Georgia city sound romantic, and “Every Time It Rains” chugged along like a Los Lobos blues with Reynolds’ powerful tenor riding on top. The album’s production, by Paul Worley and Mike Poole, proved lush enough for mainstream country, but not too overdone for fans of progressive country and Americana.
Finished after the group parted ways with their previous label, BNA (and after the departure of drummer Rick Schell and guitarist Chad Jeffers), Big Shiny Cars duplicates the successes of Pinmonkey’s previous work without adding much that’s new. Along with remaining member Michael Jeffers, guitarist Mike McAdam and drummer Mike Crouch round out the lineup, and if Crouch isn’t quite as stylish as Schell, he might rock the rather static tunes a bit more. And there’s the same combination of bluegrass harmonies and slightly experimental folk-rock: Pinmonkey’s style recalls Poco’s, but it’s also close to the power pop whose roots lie in Buffalo Springfield and Gene Clark.
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Dolly Parton’s “Down” comes closest to power pop; it’s built upon the sturdiest of triadic chord progressions. As with classic power pop, there’s a certain distance between the emotions expressed in the song and its delivery. (“You know that it’s rough / When you’re biting the dust like I am” are typical lines.) But as a recording, “Down” is superb, and shows Pinmonkey’s mastery of nuance, from its jangling guitar fills to the subtle way the band suggests the seventh chord after they sing, “I’m just down.”
Reynolds’ “Fallin’ All the Time” is country-rock as soundscape, with wet-sounding slide guitar, banjo and a background drone that is a speech fragment run backward. “Can’t Have a Hand on Me” has as its antecedent the proto-country-rock of The Byrds’ “I Know My Rider (I Know You Rider)”; it’s a modified blues built upon a guitar riff at least as old as Elmore James’ “Rollin’ and Tumblin’.” But unlike The Byrds, Pinmonkey never sound out of control, and don’t transcend their formalism—this is a song about the grip of the devil that could just as easily have been about the hand of Jesus.
What’s missing here is a sense of humor to go along with the sense of history and the intelligently managed commercial calculation. The album’s title track almost works as an examination of the band’s place in the world. Ultimately, though, “Big Shiny Cars” comes across as another song about how musicians bare their souls for money: “They sang about highways, about strippers and killers / About fingers and satin / And lamplight on lace.” Any pop musician who sings lines like, “Some day we’ll be able to get a good table / And ride around town in them big shiny cars,” should be able to make his resentment felt more than Reynolds does here.
Operating in a world where obsessive craft often stands in for the dangerous emotions that pop music can express so well, Pinmonkey never quite lets go. One could even say they lack a subject. And even formalists need something to sing about, if only to remind us of the gap that exists between ambition and achievement.