Published on May 27, 2003
Does the world really need another singer-songwriter who trolls
the aisles of the great Supermarket of Regret, throwing down
beer-soaked tirades and wounded laments?
It’s a question worth asking after coming across a debut album
like this, so rife with pain and ringing guitar riffs that you half
expect to find Paul Westerberg lurking in the liner notes. Despite
that obvious (and frankly acknowledged) influence, though, this
piece of work stands strong on its own.
Blue Sandcastle is a group that’s just barely a group; the two
members and co-writers of the album are Jean-Paul Vest (vocals,
guitars, bass) and Eric Schuman (drums). At some point along the
way they enlisted additional help from Wendy Walters (bass, backing
vocals). You’d never know the band began as a studio creation,
though, for the tracks that make up
If You Only Knew… sound both refreshingly organic and
surprisingly complete.
The music relies heavily on muscular guitar lines — very
Replacements/Gin Blossoms — but with lyrics both literate and
self-flagellating enough to remind of James McMurtry or Matthew
Ryan. Tracks of note include: the opening “Starting Gun,” with its
mythic lyric and fat, driving guitar line; “Second Place Waltz,”
with its Dylanesque vocals and a bluesy feel that builds to a
powerful finish; and their frankly brilliant cover of Willie
Nelson’s “Crazy,” where the music rocks out to the edge of control
like Marshall Crenshaw on a serious drinking jag, while the vocals
hold things together with a dreamy Chris Isaak feel that somehow
works perfectly. There’s a dash of John Hiatt to the whole thing as
well, a heady mix of intelligence, fallibility and damning
self-knowledge.
To be fair, there is a least one happy song on here, the bouncy
shout of “This Here Changes Everything,” which — one last namedrop
— has a bit of a BoDeans feel to it, albeit with extra punch on
the guitars. It just happens to be the exception. On the opposite
extreme is the other cover song here, BS’s fuel-injected, nearly
psychedelic remake of George Harrison’s “The Art Of Dying.” More
typical of Blue Sandcastle are sharply-drawn relationship portraits
with lines like “We’re speeding but I’m in no hurry / to see how
far I’ve come undone” and brutal self-examinations like
“Guardrail,” which could be subtitled “Why I Always Fuck It
Up.”
All of which brings us back to my opening question: does the
world really need another album of obsessive post-breakup songs set
to surging rock and roll guitars? As long as there’s one more
person out there in the world just about to have their heart broken
and stomped to pieces on the floor, you’re goddamned right it does.
The old saying declares that life is pain. I wouldn’t go that far
myself, but for those passing moments when it feels that way, this
album and all its ancestors and descendants are the soundtrack of
life.