Published on May 24, 2001
Does the idea of a supergroup scare you?
Granted, when artists from different bands come together to work
on a “project”, the results too often don’t live up to the
potential or hype. Perhaps this happens because the sessions are
informal and the atmosphere is very loose, not exactly a great
setting for inspiration. That said, do not be afraid of the latest
supergroup, Swag, or their CD
Catch-All.
Swag was formed when Robert Reynolds and Jerry Dale McFadden,
two members from the country band, the Mavericks, decided they
wanted to explore making an album of songs in the style of sixties
and seventies pop-rock. Before you can say “Chris Gaines”, they
hooked up with like-minded artists such as Cheap Trick bassist Tom
Petersson (obviously no stranger to seventies pop),
singer/songwriter Doug Powell, and Ken Coomer, the drummer for the
alt-country band, Wilco.
Catch-All is a virtual tour-de-force of classic pop. On each
track, the listener gets to play the game, name that influence,
starting with the faux-British Invasion opener, “Lone”. Granted,
absolutely no new ground is broken here, but what makes
Catch-All so enjoyable is the attention to detail the band
gives these songs, including the most
important detail of all: these songs are incredibly
catchy.
Powell was certainly serious about this project. The two songs
he co-wrote and sings on
Catch-All sound like they could have made it to one of his
solo albums. In fact, “When She Awoke” did appear in demo form on
his CD,
Curiouser. In
Catch-All, producer Brad Jones fleshes out the song in all
its glory, making it sound like a tender ballad
that George Harrison might have written for the Beatles.
The other song Powell wrote is much different. “I’ll Get By” is
a rocker that frankly I cannot trace the influence. Powell sings
this one with great intensity, and it is not the type of feel-good
song that dominates the CD. It has this great line: “Our love was
just a play/I never paid to see/but your little tragedy/it’s all
Greek to me.”
Catch-All alternates between ballads and rockers, for the
most part very smoothly. One exception is the sweet folk-rock
ballad, “Near Perfect Smile”, and the garage-band stomper, “Please
Don’t Tell”, which are good songs on their own, but a bit of a
rough transition hearing them back to back. These two songs do show
the versatility of Reynolds as a singer, considering he is not the
lead singer of his own band.
McFadden, the other Maverick, has a distinctively high-pitched
voice but puts it to very good use on songs like the very catchy
“Louise”, the cute Paul McCartneyesque number, “Trixie”, and on the
other end of the spectrum, the rocking “Ride”. He can also be heard
singing in unison with Reynolds on the aforementioned “Please Don’t
Tell”, and on “You”, a bluesy pop song recalling something John
Lennon might have written for the Beatles around 1968 or 1969.
By now, you’ve figured out that the Beatles are a huge influence
on
Catch-All, so much so that Coomer’s one singing
contribution, “Eight”, basically sounds like, for better or worse,
the Ringo song on a Beatles album. At least, the Beatles songs they
reference aren’t obvious ones like “I Want To Hold Your Hand”.
Other influences on
Catch-All range from the Beach Boys on the pretty ballad,
“Different Girl” to “Ride”, which not only sounds like
In Color-era Cheap Trick, but mentions Cheap Trick in the
lyrics, just in case you didn’t get the reference. “She’s
Deceiving” is the closing number and with its soft and loud
passages, it pretty much sums up the whole CD.
Is
Catch-All a great album? Hardly. Swag won’t make anyone
forget the bands or the albums that they are emulating, but if you
like the artists they like, it is definitely a fun listen. Everyone
sounds like they were having fun making it, but they also sound
like they were serious about getting it right. So for that, you
could call this an anti-supergroup album.