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The Sadies
Favourite Colours
Yep Roc Records Yep 2068
By Marianne Ebertowski
 The
Good Brothers, Dallas and Travis, from Toronto and their buddies
Mike Belitsky (drums) and Sean Dean (bass) know the history of
popular music like the best of us and their favorite colors ("favourite
colours" as they proudly spell in Canadian English) are;
sixties country rock, surf music, spaghetti western soundtracks
and psychedelia. On their fifth album they go for a sound that
wavers somewhere between the Byrds, the Ventures and Ennio Morricone,
which is not really surprising after all these years. The real
surprise lies in the astonishing craftsmanship of their songwriting,
the subtlety of their harmonies and the "blind understanding"
between the two guitar playing brothers. That's the thing, the
songs don't seem to materialize out of a thick instrumental fog
and disappear back into it almost unnoticed like on earlier albums.
Instead they grow out of an instrumental landscape, turn into
something beautiful and stay there to be remembered. The Sadies
are getting somewhere!
The album was recorded at Wavelab in Tucson, The Woodshed
in Toronto and Greg Keelor's (Blue Rodeo) Canadian farm. The
quartet invited a few friends along to play, among whom include
Richmond Fontaine's Paul Brainard, Calexico's Joe Burns, the
Good boys' parents, Bruce and Margaret, and the charmingly eccentric
English cult star Robyn Hitchcock.
On the cover, the Sadies stare into the lens like a bunch of
gloomy raincoat mafia types, but that should not fool the listener.
What they deliver is a very colorful product. The opening instrumental
"Northumberland West" is a sparkling tribute to the
late Byrds guitarist Clarence White. The Byrds twangy influence
shows even more in the next song "Translucent Sparrow,"
an eerie ditty with pedal steel and trumpet contributed by Paul
Brainard, a frenzied guitar solo and almost military, berserk
drumming
In the apocalyptic "Thousand Cities Falling (Part 1),"
the tale of a nation "led into the war to end all wars,"
Brainard's sobbing pedal steel provides a creepy and disturbing
sound track. The atmosphere lightens up in "Song of the
Chief Musician (Part 2)," a mysterious song with chiming
guitars and beautiful harmonies, then returns to gloom and heat
in "The Curdled Journey," a dust sucking cinematic
spaghetti western desert rocker with a main part for Joe Burns
on cello.
Songs with gorgeous close harmonies and ringing, intertwining
guitars ("Why be so Curious? (Part 3)," "A Good
Flying Day," "As Much as Such") are followed
by instrumentals among which the glacial, fragile and ominously
titled "The Iceberg" and the cheerful Byrds-meet-Ventures
rodeo surf rocker "Only You and Your Eyes" impress
most. Unfortunately, the album wears out a bit at the end. "A
Burning Snowman," a tedious, slow piece of surf rock, is
arguably the weakest track on the album, even though mom Good
sings on it and dad Good provides autoharp and voice.
"Coming back," a cowpunkish song doesn't really
take off either. Unfortunately, that is also true for the closer
of the album, "Why Would Anybody Live Here?" Hitchcock's
sterile singing has never rocked the world, not even England,
and the lyrics are just too precious to have any street credibility.
Memory fades, instinct takes over.
And when instinct goes, you use force. . . .
Why would anybody with integrity exist in a place like this?
I don't know about you, but the question I stay with is, "why
would anybody record a song like this?!" Still, what makes
Favourite Colours my favo (u)rite Sadies album is their
remarkable mastery of creating songs so beautiful and colorful
you want to keep them in your mind at least for the rest of the
day. I don't know about tomorrow, but, then again, nobody does.
www.thesadies.net
wwwyeproc.com
Contact Marianne Ebertowski at ebertowski-at-rockzilla.net
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