 | Overall Rating: 6.3 Lyrics: 5.9 Melodies: 6.3 Arrangements: 7.9 Thematicity: 7.2 Originality: 4.9 Production: 7.7 |
While there's a good chance you haven't heard of Toronto's (or, more correctly, Craighust's) Paso Mino, you may have even seen them perform before and been unaware of it: their primary claim to fame is that they're currently serving as the backing band for Broken Social Scenester Jason Collett. This should at least tell you two things about the band: first, they're all impressive musicians; second, they tend stylisitcally toward the alt-country and folk-rock that characterizes Collett's solo work. Their debut, Good People, not only owes a great debt to the man they're backing, but also to Drive By Truckers (whose lyrical idiom appears to be thier prototype) and to Uncle Tupelo. The arrangements on it, while centered around the typical tetrad of bass, vocals, clean guitar, and drums, also frequently includes textural overlays featuring trumpet, keyboards, and harmonica. Their songs are about break-ups, comings of age, lives spent drinking and working in factories, and small-town life. If this all sounds fairly typical of the genre, you're getting the idea: there isn't a great deal in Paso Mino's music that makes it stand out from the rest of the alt-country crowd, save the occasional engaging riff. Paso Mino are phenomenal musicians, true, but they're not phenomenal songwriters; they function extremely well as Collett's backing band, but when left to pen their own material, they fall a bit flat. As a result, arrangements are the record's strongest suit, while it comes across as lacking in terms of both lyrics and production.
Good People's two chief failings are it's lack of strong melodies (and especially of strong vocal melodies), and its awkward lyricism. The most memorable songs on the record ("Sports Car," "Ride Their Bikes") are memorable generally due to the repetition of a few key lines or a thirty-second instrumental interlude brimming with guitar hooks than a consistently catchy verse or chorus. Several of the tracks, including "Oh! Little Young One" and the record's opener "Lift My Arm," barely register at all, and others, such as "Firefly" and "Factories and Beer" only do so during a particular section of the song (in the former case, the chorus; in the latter, the song's extended, keyboard-enriched bridge riff). As for the record's lyrical shortcomings, they stem primarily from Paso Mino's attempts to emulate Drive By Truckers' gritty rural images, often-humorous fatalism, and successful attempts to breath life and novel perspective into regional chichés. The band lacks their storytelling talent, and furthermore its unity of purpose (the socio-economic perspective that leaks out on "Graduates," for example, makes "Factories and Beer" seem somewhat touristic in its vantage), and the results are somewhat lackluster: "Sports Car" differs little from the Truckers' "Daddy's Cup" in its message or its metaphor, but it's far more awkward in its delivery and doesn't offer any revelations on the subject. On the production front, there are also a few problems: the guitars are often too treble-heavy, the bass too quiet, and the auxiliary instruments poorly mixed. In addition, the production makes an explicit point of calling attention to the band's more engaging solo riffs with large leaps in volume in a way that seems to detract from the rest of the record, though perhaps they might as well: Good People doesn't have too much else to offer. It doesn't play to the band's strengths (I can imagine what a Paso Mino record based around floridly arranged instrumental riffs rather than borderline vocal performances, and I hope the band members can as well), it seems to cling to an alt-country idiom that doesn't suit the lyricists, and it evinces the lack of a galvanizing presence like Johnathan Collett, who could bring about the realization of thier potential as instrumentalists.
-BT
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