DEER TICK: BORN ON FLAG DAY

[rating:4]

Deer Tick : Born on Flag Day

Label: Partisan Records

Release Date: June 23, 2009

When listening to Born on Flag Day, it’s ex-tremely difficult to tell that Deer Tick front man John McCauley is from Rhode Island. No, seems like the casual listener would take one quick listen to the Red Dirt songscapes and McCauley’s predilection for taking his songs out onto the vast, open Midwestern skies and bellowing a big ol’ howl at the moon, and said listener would guess Mr. McCauley is from T-E-X-A-S. This version of Red Dirt or Americana (a distinction I’d guess the band wanted folks to take from the record, based on it’s Mellencamp-esque album title) is what the kids in Dillon, Texas listen to when they’re driving their beat to shit pickup trucks down a dirt road, looking for direction, and a party to boot.

Born on Flag Day sounds a little like it was recorded to have a bit of studio polish and a lot like it was recorded in a bar.  This kind of controlled looseness constitutes an overarching homespun charm that all of the songs have.  Some of these songs drip with a (previously decried) “beery wisdom,” but mostly these songs exude a sometimes joyous, sometimes somber & always contemplative feeling about love & loss.  You don’t walk away from this record with pearls of wisdom, per se, it’s much more built to be about mood & feel.  This mood is one of a classic country lament and the celebration of the bad times & failures, and sometimes celebration of the form in & of itself.  The June & Johnny inflected “Friday XIII” is a classic he said/she said, with Tennessee Three quality guitar work giving the song it’s edge; while “Smith Hill” waltzes it’s way from the back room of the bar out onto the prairie sky, with it’s bellowed chorus and it’s sorrowful fiddle backbone.  “Little White Lies,” a song built on that classic country lament (but always turning the ALT in alt-country up to 11, as when McCauley turns up the volume on his Jim Beam tarnished voice, he evokes alt progenitors Corgan & Cobain much more than Cash or Van Zandt) changes course midway from a slow jam pleading “let me be lonely tonight” to a Tex-Mex jamboree, complete with a Mendocino flavored electric guitar worthy of Freddy Fender himself.

Red Dirt homespun wisdom sometimes comes out sounding like it’s half the result of an unflinching sincerity and half the result of that 3^rd shot from the whiskey bottle, but either way, being part of that conversation is kind of vital sometimes.  Deer Tick’s contribution to the conversation is sometimes directly from “the label on the bottle that I read” (from the jubilant “The Ghost”), and this contribution really represents this little genre of music.  Let the guitars do the crying sometimes, they pull the heartstrings just as well as overt pleas, and let the cracked and handsome voice of McCauley be the reason to crack another bottle.

-John Whitaker