Album Review: Roman Candle - Oh Tall Tree in the Ear

Since I'm from Texas, Roman Candle is the music I should have been dancing to at the high school prom. Forget that schlock they play with simple, bump beats and thoughtless lyrics. I'll tomahawk my head to some old-fashioned heartbreak and anthem & Springsteen rock.

Sure, Skip Matheny's vocals are not sexy, but when you're in the blistering southern heat - which is the best way to listen to Roman Candle (think a glass of Jack Daniels and a pool) - who needs over-heated, inflamed, DUMB dance music.

The album opens with a country thunderbolt, the confident and beautiful "Eden Was a Garden." There's no saucy intro that feeds into four minutes of guitar, just straight-foward storytelling. It's loneliness in a town so hot it's desolate -

"Just the other night the clocks were moving awful slow / I heard a woman's voice coming up from the stairs below"

AH, Can you taste the whiskey? Or something like Last Picture Show in North Carolina? By default, they've been compared to Dylan - but Roman Candle is more like Jesse Malin. More Born to Run. They're modern. It's cool, they can be Dylan. They have a harmonica.

In one of the best tracks, "Big Light," Roman Candle rips open up true to their name. It starts with the sad, beer-on-wood guitar - "Sometimes I get a little lost" - but becomes lush and beautiful to the likeness of Wilco (in "Being There" clothes), "let me know if the big light is shining on me / some nights when the wind is blowing soft / it's been so long since a drink filled my head"

It's medicinal. I was so shocked by how damn precise (the perfect acoustic guitars, the invigorating drums) this album was that I almost missed the power of the last track, "Early Aubade."

An Aubade is a poem for two lovers separating at dawn. "I guess it's time to go," Skip sings, with simultaneous optimism and reluctance. I guess that's how I felt leaving the album. An "exhale" and and a love-struck burst. Are the two lovers, possibly harmonized about the entire album, getting back together? Are they moving on? If Ryan Adams album Gold is a country sonnet, than Roman Candle is full-on heartbreak immersion. I'm not moving on.

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