25 Albums I Can't Live Without: #8
Over the Rhine, "Good Dog, Bad Dog: The Home Recordings"
I’d like to start out by apologizing for not posting last week. Some other writing responsibilities dominated my time, and I just couldn’t get this one done. Now back to the countdown…
I first heard of Over the Rhine when Christian music publications heralded their first album “‘Til We Have Faces,” circa 1990-1991. The band walked that line between Christian and secular music for much of its career, but that debut album got the attention of I.R.S. Records, which released the two follow-up albums, “Patience” and “Eve,” and rereleased “‘Til We Have Faces.”
When I.R.S. dropped them, the band wanted to keep recording, so they recorded a delicate classic, 1996’s “Good Dog, Bad Dog: The Home Recordings.” Husband-and-wife Linford Detweiler and Karin Bergquist, the band’s two constant members, and Ric Hordinski and Brian Kelly, both of whom would leave the band soon after, created a folk-pop masterpiece and released it independently.
“Good Dog, Bad Dog” kicks off with the achingly spare and gorgeous “Latter Days.”
The band kicks things up a notch with “All I Need Is Everything.” Lest you think it’s an ode to materialism, the “everything” is transformation.
There’s an us-against-the-world mentality to the songs “Etcetera Whatever” and “Faithfully Dangerous, and the short instrumental “I Will Not Eat the Darkness” separates them.
Another haunting acoustic song, “The Seahorse,” follows.
Bergquist’s soaring vocals dominate “Everyman’s Daughter,” but I never really appreciated “A Gospel Number” until I heard the 2009 live version. (The latter track doesn’t really fit the vibe of the album, which is why I think I was dismissive of it for so many years.)
If “Poughkeepsie” doesn’t bring tears to your eyes, you’d better check your pulse.
“Happy to Be So” is another haunting piece that always conjures up the score to The Godfather movies for me.
The closing track, “Go Down Easy,” conjures up back-porch, dirt-road vibes for me, and it’s a great way to end the journey.
When Virgin Records signed Over the Rhine to its Backporch subsidiary, it rereleased “Good Dog, Bad Dog” in 2000 with a slightly different tracklist. “A Gospel Number” and the gosh-awful spoken word “Jack’s Valentine” were gone, and another haunting track, “It’s Never Quite What It Seems,” took those songs’ place.
Over the Rhine released a few more albums that I cherish before going in a musical direction that appealed to me less (they also started injecting politics into their music more and more). But there’s still nothing like “Good Dog, Bad Dog.”
Photo credit: hala1.geo on Flickrover the Rhine, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons