I count among life's pleasures my periodic visits to CD shops. One that is particularly close to my heart defies all odds and awaits even now but a short drive down the road from my rural Midwestern outpost, as if to defy every pundit who decrees that the format and all who support it are on the path to perdition. True, because my musical tastes are deeply arcane they are rarely served there in any direct fashion. But I never fail to bring home more broadly mainstream albums alight with some approximation to the sounds I treasure.

It was in that context a few years ago that I stumbled upon Son Volt, which is not somebody's name but the title of a band, inspired by the titles of a couple of classic mid-century sound amplifiers. In fact, the group's one constant is the St. Louis-based Jay Farrar, who is its songwriter and lead vocalist, co-founder of the late Uncle Tupelo (another band name), which slipped some traditional American folk songs into its repertoire when no other rockers were doing that. It also inspired, to the lasting ambivalence of some, the so-called Americana genre -- to us of an unsentimental disposition a faux-roots, non-hiphop pop music for our time. Son Volt is better than most of the competition (if it is indeed competition), though, and you don't even have to invent a pretentious name for what it's doing. It's good old-fashioned folk-rock. You could even date it to the 1960s if you wanted, but somehow Son Volt, very much awake and alert in our own world, doesn't feel dated in the least.

Electro Melodier sort of took over my summer after I picked up a copy while on a disc-trolling expedition to my beloved Last Stop CD Shop in Marshall, Minnesota. The album's mood captured my own, of a nation in peril to looming dark forces, except that Farrar is singing, not just thinking, that thought while compellingly evoking the existential unease it engenders. He accomplishes this without ever lapsing into either sentimental optimism or sentimental despair. Farrar remains at all times morally centered and philosophically balanced. Not to say, let us be clear, possessed of any illusion that "both sides do it," rather possessed of the simple conviction that if we remain steadfast we will endure.

While his lyrics convey truths, often movingly so, they are too rough, at points borderline incoherent, to transfer smoothly to the page. But this is true even of the "poetical" likes of Bob Dylan. A song brings forth more than the sum of its words to communicate meaning, and Farrar has going for him a superior, sympathetic band, plus some exceptional melodies such as, for one example, that attached to the history-influenced ballad "The Levee on Down," about the Trail of Tears on which the Cherokee were driven during President Andrew Jackson's brutal administration. In an inspired stroke Farrar refrains from naming Jackson at all, alluding to him simply as the "dead President" on the 20-dollar bill. This is all delivered at Farrar's most morose as he sings atop an almost scarily lovely tune that might have hung around since the early 19th century.

The equally melodic, folkish "Sweet Rebetika" (the latter from a form of Greek stringband music popular at the beginning of the last century) returns to an apocalyptic theme I associate with the first Farrar song ever to come my way, on an anthology of singer-songwriters: the harrowing "Barstow," which has that hardscrabble California desert city standing in for a nation in radical collapse. If nothing on Electro Melodier has quite that cleansing-fire transformative power, "Livin' in the USA" is the perfect anthem for this summer of dread, resistance ruinous and constructive, and -- somewhere -- hope for renewal, as the greatest of all Americans said in another bleak moment, into a new birth of freedom. Son Volt puts it matter of factly, singing of freedom in Farrar's measured if less uplifting voice: In a sea of noise it's still there but tuned out/ Livin' in the USA.

Listen to Son Volt casually, and you'd swear you're hearing the soundtrack to the end of the republic, maybe of the world. And maybe it is, for all we know. Yet Farrar embraces a mature understanding of the cycles of history, not to mention a sense that sanity and decency may yet prevail even as daily we buckle from the onslaught of their opposite. It's a modest hope, but it's one I have carried with me, along with my copy of Electro Melodier, through this summer of 2021.

[ visit Son Volt online ]