After releasing a glittery and sleazy breakthrough rock record with the Let’s-Go-Out-Tonites in 2006 and going on to produce a series of similar sounding albums for Avril Lavigne, The Academy Is… and Hot Hot Heat in the time since, it was perfectly reasonable to assume that listeners knew what to expect of anything that bore Butch Walker’s name. That’s not meant to sound like a disparaging statement in the slightest (although it probably sounds like one) and, in fact, sometimes it’s reassuring to know what to expect from a singer.
If you think you know what to expect from Butch Walker though, you’d be wrong and Sycamore Meadows clinches it.
From the opening minor-key-and-balladesque explosion of “The Weight Of Her,” Walker spontaneously and completely abandons the image he’s spent the last eighteen months cultivating both with his own music and that of the records he’s produced and dives headfirst into a sort of roots-rock/indie anthemia that will turn heads first because it’s so different from anything the singer/producer has attempted before. The ghosts of such roots, rock and even punk luminaries as Wilco, The Replacements, Springsteen and Bryan Adams dominate the dozen songs that make up Sycamore Meadows and, while there is still a touch of residual Let’s-Go-Out sleaze in the lyric sheets of songs like “Going Back/ Going Home,” they’re overlaid here by sweet and laidback (or lowdown) Southern-fried rhythms and heartbreaking/nostalgic melodies that make you want to fall in love with a singer that previously romanticized fast women and copious amounts of cocaine. The transition is utter and complete here though and listeners can almost hear Walker enjoy the simpler pleasures of walking through a heartland wheat field (“3 Kids In Brooklyn”) and climbing a lattice to knock on a pretty girl’s window after lights out (“Here Comes The…”) for one last kiss.
So are any of those images real or genuine? Walker never tells here but, the way it’s presented to listeners here, by the time the singer wraps his cracked-but-pristine throat around the Dylan-ish “A Song For The Metalheads,” there’s not a single soul that doesn’t want to buy what Walker’s selling; by then, there isn’t a dry seat in the house and, just to seal the deal, he pulls a rabbit out of his hat with the best alt-country tune written in years in the form of “Closer To The Truth And Farther From The Sky.”
So what does Sycamore Meadows give listeners? Food for thought first – like Daniel Lanois before him, Butch Walker has reaffirmed the theory that just because you’re good at one thing doesn’t mean it’s the only thing you’ve got. Sycamore Meadows is proof of that fact; with such sweet songs contrasted against his previous efforts, the singer illustrates that there’s more to Butch Walker than anyone could have dreamed.
Artist
Butch Walker Online
Butch Walker myspace
