Vintage Review: Bobby Bare Jr's Young Criminals’ Starvation League's From the End of Your Leash (2004)

Bobby Bare Jr’s eponymously named band cranked out two high-voltage collections of wonderfully rowdy twang-rock for two different major labels before imploding under the weight of industry expectations. Going solo, Bare Jr – scion of the country music legend of the same name – rebounded with the surprisingly morose Young Criminals’ Starvation League for alt-country indie Bloodshot. The album was a collection of lush, reflective roots-rock more akin to Nashville’s Lambchop, or maybe Josh Rouse, than to the reckless country soul of his two previous full-band albums.

For his second solo album, Bare Jr has crafted a set of songs that fall somewhere between the raucous rave-ups of his band era and the retrospective country dirges of his debut. Enlisting the help of a dozen-and-a-half of the Music City’s most talented players, including former band members Mike “Grimey” Grimes and Tracy Hackney, as well as various members of Lambchop, Bare Jr has managed to pull off the best of both worlds. “From the End of Your Leash” features songs that are, at times, rambunctious and, at other times, bitingly melancholy. No matter which speed he dials up, Bare Jr manages to seep each song in black humor and deliver his witty, intelligent lyrics in a fractured vocal style that is at once both irritating and entirely contagious.

The finest moment to be found on “From the End of Your Leash” is also possibly Bare Jr’s best song yet, the tongue-in-cheek “Visit Me In Music City.” Bare’s mythologizing of his hometown is simply priceless as he describes hills that are “filled with naked Hee Haw honeys,” guitar strings that grow on trees and police that carry capos “in case you want to change your key.” Bare Jr explains that, in Nashville, “you don’t even have to sing on key…producers with computers can fix it all.” If you visit, Bare Jr sings, “we’ll drink all night and write songs no one will sing.” The song is a glimpse of light revealing the sentimentalist behind Bare Jr’s dark worldview and an indication of the fine music we can expect from the artist in the future. (Bloodshot Records, released 2004)

Review originally published by Alt.Culture.Guide™ zine