Post Description

The Walkabouts - Death valley days

These sleeve notes have been written between the burning out of a hit and run car on waste ground beyond my house and the harvest moon waning through early autumn storms. The past is so close and it's full of lost songs, rarities and did anyone even know how this album would turn out? Every time The Walkabouts talked about it there'd be a different mix of tracks as songs they hadn't heard in years seemed better in memory than they did to their ears when unearthed. The songs cover ten years of change. How these changes sound to you depends so much on where and how the group first struck you. Maybe you're from Seattle, saw them growing up through the clubs and want to check how far away they've gone. Maybe you've heard how Seattle is isolated and on the edge of the wilderness of the Cascades and Olympic mountains (central Seattle is 20 minutes drive from Twin Peaks country) and wonder how eerie does it get. Maybe you caught them somewhere out on the road and what came through was the feel of the road in their songs, images of travel and uprootedness. Maybe you've followed them through their ten albums and expect this to be number eleven, but if those albums are the history of the group, then this is the alternative history.

This album is not a "best of," but a chronicle of the experiments and the lesser numbers that didn't fit into the scheme of things at any one time. It is not a comprehensive collection, but a series of snapshots, leaving plenty of room for a second collection to plug the gaps and tell the same story from a different angle yet again. It is also fragmentary because of the long hiatuses between record labels at different parts of their career.

It's a surprise (to me at least) to find how all the official albums are coherent in sound and don't have outtakes associated with them. This is similar to the way that the Byrds always saw their albums, as annual aural magazine, each one being a document of where they were at a particular point in time. "On the Beach" for instance would have no place on any of the albums recorded immediately before or after it. If you think of the Walkabouts story as being documented by their albums, then this album of lost songs presents us with totally different viewpoint on their story, in places even you could say that it is a totally different story.

Geschreven door: Paul Ricketts, Swindon, England, 1996


Tracks:

1 - Drunk ( on a Civilized Rule)
3 - Barnstorming
4 - Chain Gang
5 - On the Beach
6 - Big Black Car
7 - Cello Song
8 - Maggie's Farm
9 - Break It Down Gently
10 - Train to Mercy
11 - Yesterday Is Here
12 - Prisoner of Taxas
13 - Inaguration Day
14 - Pass Me on Over
15 - Like a Hurricane
16 - House of the Rising Sun
17 - Loswerden
18 - Sand & Gravel Strings