This week in "Dan Digs," Mike digs. For one week only, Mike Smith, writer of "My Strange New Mexico," and Daniel Garcia, writer of "Dan Digs," are switching columns. Check out tomorrow's Daily Lobo for Garcia's take on "My Strange New Mexico," and keep on reading for Smith's musical recommendation.
by Mike Smith
Daily Lobo
Aside from the desert, writing and my family, the greatest love of my life has always been music.
Music has always been there for me - providing lyrics to justify my adolescence, soundtracks for my friendships, and a major source of relaxation, energy and catharsis. And usually, my favorite music is made by musicians willing to evolve - bands like Radiohead and Wilco - bands that change, play around and push themselves to do more.
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That said, one of my favorite musical evolutions is Soltero.
Soltero is a Philadelphia singer-songwriter named Tim Howard, accompanied by an always-changing cast of other musicians. Influenced by the best of indie rock - Yo La Tengo, East River Pipe and Elliott Smith - and classic rock - Roy Orbison, America and Blue Oyster Cult - Soltero's sound is reinvented with every album. His lyrics are often dark and sardonic, often happy (though seemingly surprised to be so), clever without being smarmy, introspective without being self-absorbed, and sometimes so personal that my wife has cried while listening to them.
I didn't cry, though. Not me - I'm a man.
Soltero's sound varies wildly from album to album, but it's always thoughtful and melodic, always beautiful, and often so rocking, it nearly makes me wreck my car. Howard's voice is deep and gravel-filled, like a young Leonard Cohen's. But he's also capable of reaching a high range reminiscent of Neil Young.
On 2001's Science Will Figure You Out, Howard is backed up by acclaimed Massachusetts rockers the Mobius Band, who provide a joyous surprise appearance by a drum machine, a guitar that slides like ice across a hot iron and the punk rock coda of "Kentuckyland," which no instructor of Primal Scream should ever forget to bring to class. Howard has an amazing ability to write poppy love songs deftly entwined with political thought and sentiment, in a way no one since Billy Bragg has done so well. Soltero's "Communist Love Song" uses communism as an analogy for love - "It was well-conceived in theory, but it doesn't work in life," and ends with the stunning lyric, "If you're ever less than certain, I will be your iron curtain, I will be your
Berlin Wall, and I will never fall."
2003's Defrocked and Kicking the Habit sees Howard experimenting with the occasional banjo in place of guitar, a new and much larger band, and the introduction of Tom Hummel - a brilliant trumpet and horns player whose contributions make this album sure to appeal to any fan of Belle and Sebastian. In 2004, Soltero released The Tongues You Have Tied, a startlingly quiet folk-pop masterpiece recorded almost solo and containing echoes of Nick Drake and the Mamas and the Papas.
Then, in 2005, there was Hell Train, which is one of the greatest albums in the history of rock 'n' roll. Honestly. This is a tight album with flow and energy, with challenge and excitement, a joyful album with surprisingly dark themes. The structures of its songs are always original; the instrumentation is inspired and eclectic; Howard's voice is always dead on and genuine; and the songs' lyrics - for instance, "If I had a chance to make things right, I'd only waste it on my life" - are clever and original, expertly showcasing the ongoing evolution of Soltero as a musical experience and Howard as a thinking, feeling human being.
Soltero's next album, You're No Dream, will no doubt bring with it yet another step in this musical evolution. I plan on being the first to buy it, and you should consider being the second.
For more about Soltero, visit
SolteroSongs.com
