War Elephant is an album with a greasy slick identity crisis. It‘s full of slide guitars and boxcar shuffling percussion but also songs that descend into indie rock aping (“Dirty Dishes”) of Modest Mouse via The Elected. Deer Tick may be singing the blues but 21 year-old frontman’s (John McCauley) voice fits right into the indie’s penchant for quavering singers. He sounds like he’s singing off the back of a train (“These Old Shoes”) or in some filthy Southern bar (“Diamond Rings 2007”). Despite the attention to the guttersnipe milieu, these late-night songs about unlucky people “running out of steam” contain some sort of awkward poignancy. On the feedback blues rocker, “Not So Dense” that moment comes when McCauley sings, “if you don’t drink your milk young man you know it will turn sour, and I watched 60 minutes go by hour after hour after hour.” On those last five words his screaming voice is put through a shredder. Likewise, from that point on, the rest of the album (save for “Diamond Rings 2007”) sounds like the musical mulch of the beginning of the album.

Elephant contains small moments where all the pieces come together and give you a sense of place. Whether or not these are meant to be folk songs or not some truly end up being some damn respectable ones. The forlorn violin solo on “Nevada” helps you visualize the kind of state where there’s “no valley or river to hide.” The rambling guitar runs into the drama and that desolate horizon is as lonesome as you might surmise.

Album opener, “Ashamed,” features some wistful fiddle playing as McCauley’s caterwauling self-pity escalates over finger-picked guitar, “I should have been an angel but I’m too dumb to speak.” Talk about crying into your beer and drinking it too. The coda of that song tumbles right into the next, “Art Isn’t Real (City of Sin).” Slide guitars, more of that fiddle playing, and some more romancing with the beer bottle adds to a song that is likeable but not exactly anything different from anything else on the album. Those lyrics aren’t too far off the musical train track either: “I am the dotted line and you fill me in with whatever you like” I gotta get drunk, I gotta forget about some things.

Just when you think you have McCauley’s aesthetic pinned, (an indie rock slacker wearing alt-country clothing) he turns over and reveals his dark and considerably less appealing dark underbelly to close the album. Howling guitars on “Not So Dense” portend McCauley’s shredded punk vocals. He dips back into alt-country territory on the swaying affability of “Spend the Night” but on “Sink Or Swim” his crying gets more desperate and the music feels like a heavy lager. “Chirist Jesus” pushes further down into the hole over a dank guitar line. The closing “What Kind of Fool Am I?” is the kind of end-of-the-drunken party ridiculousness that sours the good times you may remember the day after (and there are good times on this album). McCauley’s lounge singing could stand for some work and I could stand to listen to something else, because I’ve got to get rid of this lingering hangover.
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Links
Deer Tick [official site] [myspace]