Tommy Keene has been making music for more than 30 years. He's toured with
historically significant artists including The Ramones, Patti Smith and The
Replacements, and he's currently on the road as Robert Pollard's
guitarist. (The two of them are recording an album as the Keene Brothers
later this year.) Still, you can't avoid the slight whiff of
disappointment that hovers around his career, the sense that songcraft and
instrumental skill never won him the success he deserved. Keene's best
known solo recording is still 1984's Places That Are Gone, an EP
that ranked #1 on the Pazz & Jop poll for that year, more than two
decades ago.
Crashing the Ether, Keene's 10th solo album, has, therefore, a
fitting sense of nostalgia, wistfulness and awareness of missed
opportunity. Musically, it's a bit of a time capsule, filled with the kind
of jangly guitar hooks that ruled the airwaves during the Reagan
administration. Lyrically, too, there's a fair amount of looking
backward. The first single off Crashing the Ether is called "Warren
in the 1960s," and whether it's about Warren Beatty or some other
long-forgotten acquaintance, it is clear that Warren in the 2000s is a pale
substitute. Yet though there's nothing trendy or post-modern about Tommy
Keene's latest, it is a very appealing album, with strong songs, dizzying
harmonies and radiant guitar work. You get the sense that the record
sounds exactly the way that Keene wanted it to, and if the songs aren't
fashionably current, it makes no difference to him.
The disc starts explosively, with John Richardson's echoing drums kicking
off "Black & White New York." Circling guitar lines percolate under the
verse, but the pay-off comes in the soaring chorus, "Lights around the
shore/ Black & white New York/ Thrilling me." It's undeniably exciting and
also bittersweet, as it captures the nervous exhilaration of a young man
taking the world by the tail — but from the perspective of his older
self. "Warren in the 1960s" has the same kind of rueful reflectiveness,
the same infectious R.E.M.-ish guitar tangle. Like all the album's cuts, it's
polished and professional, but there's an engaging roughness in Keene's
voice that keeps it real and immediate.
Of the slower songs, "Driving Down That Road in My Mind" is perhaps the
strongest, evoking Paul Westerberg's damaged lyricism in its sweeping melodic
lines. It's a classic power ballad, taking listeners from thoughtful
melancholy to triumph and even euphoria when those sweet, viscous guitars
erupt out of the chorus near the end. "Wishing," too, is quite good,
earnest verses exploding into an obscenely catchy refrain.
This is the kind of album that would have sounded perfectly comfortable on
the AAA radio of the early 1990s, in amongst cuts from Matthew Sweet's
Girlfriend, Westerberg's 14 Songs and the Gin Blossoms'
New Miserable Experience (ex-Gin Blossom Jesse Valenzuela sings
backup on a couple of tracks). It's not the new new thing. Listening to
it is not going to improve your cool factor. But it is well-made and
emotionally honest, full of quality pop songs that will hang on past their
playtime.
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