Strangers Almanac: Deluxe Edition

I think it was summer 1997 when I saw my first and only Whiskeytown show. My memory is cloudy and I don't have the ticket stub anymore, so I don't recall who they opened for (I'm pretty sure it was Son Volt) or which songs they played. I do remember that it was at the New Daisy Theatre on Beale Street in Memphis, and that I was pleasantly surprised by their performance. Of course, I'd heard of Whiskeytown: Faithless Street, the North Carolina band's full-length debut, had been trumpeted by No Depression (R.I.P.) and had become an alt-country touchstone. Still, I thought that album sounded derivative and a little dull, too indistinct up against bands like the Old 97's and Freakwater. So I was only mildly curious when Whiskeytown took the stage and played new songs from their upcoming major-label debut, Strangers Almanac.

Scruffy Ryan Adams, who looked muscular in a black t-shirt, had a good rapport with violinist Caitlin Cary, who stood off to the side and handled most of the between-song banter. There was an easy chemistry between them, guitarist Phil Wandscher, and the new rhythm section, and they funneled all that famous band tension into a tight, energetic show. I left convinced that they would make a great album someday.

Sadly, Strangers Almanac wasn't it. Alternately confident and overreaching, original and derivative, it showed a band still coming into their own and a singer-songwriter still settling into his voice. The band borrow obviously from the Replacements ("Yesterday's News"), Bruce Springsteen ("Houses on the Hill"), Uncle Tupelo ("Losering"), Gram Parsons ("Dancing with the Women at the Bar"), and the True Believers (Alejandro Escovedo sings the bridge on "Excuse Me While I Break My Own Heart"). At the time, they were unable to integrate these influences into a distinctive, personal sound.

More than 10 years after its initial release, Strangers Almanac is getting the deluxe, two-disc reissue treatment, complete with five live tracks from the band's studio performance at KCRW, the complete Barn's on Fire and Baseball Park sessions, and a handful of stray covers and soundtrack contributions, which vary from excellent (the darkly urgent "Breathe") to the throwaway (the overwrought "Wither, I'm a Flower"). Despite the official plastic "deluxe" slipcase and thoughtful liner notes by No Depression co-founder Peter Blackstock, I get the impression that the album's reputation has more to do with the music the band made afterwards than with the music the band made at this particular point in their careers.

Adams in particular sounds like he's still finding his voice on the album, despite the many accolades for his songwriting. The album proper is littered with clunky lines and unwieldy imagery, such as the lame pun that anchors the drowsy opener "Inn Town", which plays out in the chorus as "When I'm in(n) town..." The verse melody on "16 Days" sounds awkward, never quite resolving itself satisfactorily, and Adams writes some of his most maudlin lyrics on the bridge: "Old tin cups, little paper dolls/ All wrapped up, in ribbons bowed with hearts."

His subjects-- broken hearts, unspoken apologies, lonely roads, cheap motels-- were common to almost every alt-country band in the late 90s, but somehow his treatment sounds obligatory, as if he's learning to speak a new language. On "Dancing with the Women at the Bar", the father-and-son tale of life on the strip lacks that one crucial detail that would make it believable or lend it personal gravity, but fortunately, the song veers into one of Adams' loveliest and most forlorn choruses, which producer Jim Scott underlays with a thrumming organ more evocative than any of the lyrics. In fact, Scott, who had previously worked with Tom Petty and Wilco and who has since worked with Foo Fighters and Wilco again, helps Whiskeytown put many of these songs over, adding those explosive chords to the chorus of "Yesterday's News" and those ghostly doubled vocals to "Not Home Anymore", which reinforce its sense of isolation. The alarm clock that ends the album, however, remains a needless gimmick.

Several weeks after the Memphis show, Strangers Almanac arrived in stores heralded with a lot of hype, but due to either Outpost's lackluster promotional push or to the growing rift between the band members, it was not the predicted break-out (Even Grant Alden, No Depression's other co-founder, gave it only three stars in Rolling Stone, calling the band "still tentative, still learning"). Before breaking up, the band-- well, Adams, Cary, and guests-- recorded a follow-up, which was shelved until 2001. That album, cryptically titled Pneumonia, was the great album I wanted Strangers Almanac to be, a well-written and wide-ranging collection of songs that nicely realized the possibilities of Adams' voice melding naturally and beautifully with Cary's.

In some ways, Strangers Almanac is a relic of late-90s alt-country, representing a moment just before so many of its most popular acts broke free of the genre's conservative strictures and began experimenting with a wider sonic palette. As such, the album feels a little dated; it's hard to understand how it would have been revolutionary eleven years ago. Either the aesthetic of country embellishments on a rock framework has been so absorbed by Starbucks roots music or maybe I've just gotten too old, but very little about Strangers Almanac feels especially innovative in 2008. It just sounds like another rock album, sturdy enough but rarely engrossing.