Stalwart Midwestern roots-rockers THE BOTTLE ROCKETS have been kicking around for well over a decade now, but with new members Keith Voegele (bass) and guitarist John Horton now joining founding duo Brian Hennemann (vocals/ guitar) and drummer Marc Ortmann for their eighth album “Zoysia” they appear to have got their second wind, as “Zoysia” – their eighth album, by my reckoning – is perhaps their most raggedly glorious set yet.
Recorded with producer Jeff Powell at Memphis’s legendary Ardent Studios (Big Star, Replacements etc), the album takes its’ name from a particularly resilient type of US grass (the lawn variety, rather than exotic Mexican or Moroccan) which has a reputation for stubbornly sticking around once it’s established itself. I think there’s a metaphor in there where The Bottle Rockets are concerned, and certainly their songs here are – as always – tough and tender, experience-fuelled affairs with durability to spare.
Proceedings open promisingly with the rousing “Better Than Broken” and the inevitable spectre of Crazy Horse looming over Hennemann’s tale of losing in love and being forced to move on. “These days my heart’s better than broken, not as good as new” he admits ruefully, before the band crash into the wonderfully tongue-in-cheek “Middle Man”: a great misfit anthem if ever there was with Hennemann feeling himself “stuck here in the middle, right between anything tangible.” And if that’s not an observation most of us can identify with, then I don’t know what is.
Elsewhere, the Rockets veer confidently between chunky and immediate pop/ rockers like the full-blooded “Suffering Servant” and the excellent “Mountain To Climb” and rootsier affairs like “Blind”: a memorable two-step with a notable anti-prejudice message to mull over and tasty mandolin and lap steel embellishments from the talented Horton. They also quaff deeply from the country well on tracks like “Feeling Down”s sad and blue shuffle and recall the New Amsterdams’ rootless poignancy on the slow, Mississippi delta lament of “Where I’m From” as well as throwing the odd likeable curve like the funky drinker’s anthem “I Quit”, which also features some suitably sassy backing vocals from former Afghan Whigs’ alumnus Susan Marshall.
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They save arguably the best for the closing title track, a postcard from the ultra-conservative Midwest and a place where “in the meantime life just goes on, we pay our bills and mow our lawns.” A lengthy, but disciplined seven minutes and something of a blue-collar tour de force ending in a rare old Crazy Horse guitar storm, it’s a fine toast to longevity and resilience to remind us that – even in these disposable days – there are still cussed critters like The Bottle Rockets who refuse to simply die away. We really ought to do rather better in cherishing them.
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