Artist: Drag The River
Album: It's Crazy.
Label: Suburban Home Records
Tracks: 13
Review By: Jacob Gehman

Alternative country, as trail blazed by such luminaries as Uncle Tupelo and Whiskeytown, is perhaps not as far from regular country as fans might like you to believe. While today's pop country is full of sappy lyrics and men crooning in cowboy boots and bandanas, this wilder form hearkens back to the days of Willie Nelson and Johnnny Cash and Merle Haggard while hinting at a generation who grew up listening to punk rock and Metallica. But at it's core, country is country and there is nothing wrong with that.

I had never heard of Drag The River before this album showed up so I had no idea about the band's history. Apparently they've been around in one form or another since 1996 and "It's Crazy" is their fourth studio full length. With the weeping pedal steel guitar and cigarette accented vocals there is no mistaking them for anything except a country band.

Acoustic guitars dominate the sonic palate, with the exception of noodling solos and the afore mentioned pedal steel. There is definitely a spaghetti western feel to parts of this album. It is the electric guitar solos that bring many of these tracks alive. They have a vibrancy to them, partly because of their unrelenting consistency, and partly just in the carefree way they're played.

The songs themselves aren't immediately catchy. They pass in and out of the headphones the first several times through. There are the softer mid-tone songs and then the swifter rocking ones and, usually, it is the latter which ends up being the most successful. However, the laidback songs are also well done. They just don't strike my personal fancy the way the others might.

One interesting note about the album is that despite it's thirteen tracks there are only twelve different songs. Track thirteen, which is the one titled "It's Crazy," actually runs through the entire album as one track. Which, as someone on a message board mentioned, is handy if you ever see it in a jukebox. Play the whole album for the price of
one song.

Overall this is an above par album, though not so exceptional that I would go out and buy it. Fans of the alternative country scene should dig this. But at it's core, country is country and there is nothing wrong with that.