Because it is so economic, Hollywood Town Hall becomes the Jayhawks' greatest statement.
Every song sounds ideally and carefully concise, adding to the effect of the whole. The five bonus tracks neither distract from nor add to the original, but they do reveal the tracklist as a model of economic editing and sequencing. Their approach is based on old-time country sibling acts like the Louvin and Stanley Brothers, yet those tightly intertwined vocals are reset in a dusty, electrified setting, marking perhaps the Jayhawks' greatest innovation. The songs have a greater live feel, but Hollywood Town Hall remains primarily a vocal album, with the harmonies of Louris and Olson at the center.
Louris' guitar cuts elegant swathes through these songs, and the new remaster brings out the rich tones in the instruments themselves, especially Benmont Tench's organ on "Crowded in the Wings". Hollywood Town Hall is, appropriately, a good road-trip album, moving from pre-dawn departure ("Waiting for the Sun") to a hard-won destination ("Martin's Song", with its chorus, "I've been working all night, I go long into day"). They show the Jayhawks unmoored from any one particular trend or style, devising new ways to combine roots and rock without skimping on either. Neither of these albums was a hit, exactly, but they have endured to become something more impressive. Hollywood Town Hall and Tomorrow the Green Grass still live and breathe, and these two new, long-awaited reissues sound like the logical conclusions of a legacy-shaping campaign that began with 2009's career retrospective, Music From the North Country.
#The jayhawks discography rar full#
Even so, a full 25 years after forming, the Jayhawks don't come across as also-rans, which is itself a minor miracle. What the Jayhawks never drifted toward was success- at least not the kind that they and their fans felt the music warranted. The band incorporated a wide range of styles and influences into their stately Americana, not just country and certainly not punk, but classic rock, folk, power pop, and lots of feedback from Gary Louris fuzzbox-filtered guitar- all seemingly absorbed with every mile of road traveled and every city played. They were alt-country merely by coincidence, gestating in isolation and predating the movement by several years. In the late 1980s and early 90s, they stayed on the road almost constantly, paying their dues and gradually playing to larger and larger audiences. The Jayhawks were never so down on their luck as their characters, but they were drifters just the same, ostensibly headquartered in the Twin Cities but always traveling to the next show and the next show after that. In just a few short paragraphs, Henry evokes not so much the music made by the Minneapolis band, but presumably what the music was about: wayward drifters with sad histories who disappeared, hitting the road in search of better times. The liner notes to the Jayhawks' career-making 1992 album, Hollywood Town Hall, were written by friend-of-the-band Joe Henry, then a struggling musician himself (and now one of the most prolific producers around).
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