Backyard Tire Fire
(Hyena)
Backyard Tire Fire usually gets unfairly burdened with the alt-country albatross, and while it's true that the band often resorts to country-rock constructs for its carefully-crafted songs, BTF just as often defies any easy categorization. Sure, you'll hear a heavy debt to the early-nineties "No Depression" blueprint created by Wilco and Son Volt in any Backyard Tire Fire song, but if you put your ear close to the ground, you'll also pick up the fine threads of BTF frontman Edward Anderson's ambitiously creative soundscapes and intelligent, emotionally-complex lyrics. Truth is, Backyard Tire Fire sound like a lot of bands (The Jayhawks, Tom Petty, Son Volt, etc), and yet sound like nobody but themselves.
The Places We Lived is Backyard Tire Fire's fourth studio effort, an album that shows the band's continued maturity and absolute willingness to climb out on the tightrope without a safety net in sight. The music here is unabashedly rock, with a twist of twang and hints of folk, but it also ranges from the raucous to the sublime, touching many bases in between. For instance, the claustrophobic "Welcome To The Factory" crosses Neil Young with Pink Floyd, kicking off with a riff nicked directly from Tom Petty, the song's eerie ambience created by Anderson's haunted vocals and the band's crowded, busy, and often discordant instrumentation.
The title track offers a bouncy, fond reminiscence of simpler times, and "Everybody's Down" offers acute observations on the working class blues set to Spartan instrumentation. The gauzy "Rainy Day (don't go away)" mixes melancholy, heavily-echoed vocals with rich piano intertwined while "Legal Crimes" is a venomous accounting of the music biz backed with crunchy guitars and a hooky chorus. The Places We Lived is inventive, intelligent, genre-crossing good fun, Backyard Tire Fire a band defiantly swimming against the raging current of cookie-cutter corporate rock and alt-country bands. Personally, I wouldn't bet against them....
Standout Tracks: "The Places We Lived," "Welcome To The Factory" REV. KEITH A. GORDON
