The Curmudgeon: Rock Bands Unafraid of the Past

The Wood Brothers began as a kind of family reunion. Chris Wood, based in New York City, was nationally famous as one third of the jazz trio Medeski Martin Wood. Oliver Wood, based in Atlanta, was regionally respected as the chief singer-songwriter-guitarist for the Southern-rock quintet King Johnson. At first the Wood Brothers were just a side project, but the combination of Chris’s muscular, adventurous bottom and Oliver’s fable-like rock hymns proved irresistible, and the group started drawing crowds too large to ignore.

With multi-instrumentalist Jano Rix making the band a trio, the Wood Brothers hit that sweet spot of linking the past to the future—avoiding both retro nostalgia and rootless novelty. Such roots-rock acts satisfy our hunger for art that moves through time. We are all influenced by those who came before us; we can’t deny that past any more than we can stay there. We need to take what we’ve inherited and refashion it into something new that adds ourselves to the mix. The Wood Brothers have done that as well as anyone.

Oliver, though, has evolved into a prolific composer who has written songs for more material than the Wood Brothers can record. Some of those songs have been recorded by Shemekia Copeland, Kathy Mattea and Seth Walker, and some have surfaced on Oliver’s two solo albums: 2021’s pandemic effort, Always Smilin’, and this summer’s Fat Cat Silhouette. Chris doesn’t appear on the new disc, but Rix is involved as a percussionist, writer and producer. No one can replace Chris’s one-of-a-kind bass playing, but Ted Pecchio does a respectable job as the sub. And Oliver gets to try out a lot of arrangement ideas—more experimental, less groove-oriented, less fleshed-out—that wouldn’t fit the Wood Brothers M.O.

The result is further evidence that Oliver is one of our best rock ‘n’ roll songwriters, setting quirky, John Prine-like aphorisms to gospel-soul singalongs. On the opening track, “Light and Sweet,” he contemplates a sparrow outside his window and imagines that it’s on the phone to a divorce lawyer. This sets up a catchy chorus of oohs and a choir of gossips who “say anything they want.” The album takes its title from “Little Worries,” which starts with another animal in a window and muses about the ways our good moods always seem to curdle, just as the song’s relaxed tune falls apart into discordant piano chords.

Between 2008 and 2020, the original line-up of X (singers John Doe and Exene Cervenka, guitarist Billy Zoom and drummer D.J. Bonebrake) reunited for occasional tours that revisited the songs they’d released on their five historic albums from 1980 through 1985. It was an odd situation, playing oldies for aging punk fans, but the songs held up and they still played ferociously. The shows were successful, and they financed the members’ solo projects—most notably Doe’s explorations of Americana and Bonebrake’s jazz ventures.

Then, in 2020, X surprised everyone by releasing Alphabetland, their first studio album in 23 years (and their first with Zoom in 35 years). Now they’ve released what they’re calling their final album of new songs: Smoke & Fiction. The first two songs on the new disc are full-tilt punk stampedes with Doe’s and Cervenka’s beat-poet lyrics carried on the wave of Zoom’s guitar and Bonebrake’s drums. In the next few songs, however, the quartet’s long-standing roots in rockabilly, folk-rock and British Invasion classicism surface through the staccato beats.

It was that tension between pop-music history and punk-rock anti-history that made X the most interesting of the post-Ramones bands. That same push-and-pull makes Smoke & Fiction one of the year’s best roots-rock albums. The stomping, nightmarish tale of a relationship that waxes and wanes like the “Face in the Moon” benefits from Doe’s chorus hook. Zoom’s slashing guitar riff on “Baby & All” is set off by the nursery-rhyme singalong by Doe and Cervenka. Best of all is “The Way It Is,” a brooding, garage-rock ballad about reluctantly accepting the end of an affair.

Dave Alvin, who briefly joined X in 1986, has just released Texicali, his second album with fellow singer-songwriter Jimmie Dale Gilmore. The two men can be equally effective as acoustic folk singers and as members of loud, electric bands. The duo’s first album, 2018’s Downey to Lubbock, reflected the acoustic tour they’d just done. Since then, they’ve been touring with Alvin’s band, the Guilty Ones, and the new record echoes the roots-rock nature of those shows. If the first focused on the singers’ way with words, the new one showcases how those words give and take with the amps behind them.

Alvin, who first emerged as a member of the Blasters from Downey, California, and Gilmore, who first made his name as a member of the Flatlanders from Lubbock, Texas, are used to working with rhythm sections schooled in blues and country. They’re not afraid to test the strength of their stories against the rumble of blues guitars and honky-tonk drums. The instruments back these story songs from the two principals as well as Big Bill Broonzy, Terry Allen and Brownie McGhee the same way cinematography supports actors in a movie.