‘Settling down’ is generally accepted as a tragic turn in the world of rock ’n’ roll. For the most part, the best albums of the genre have been produced with the aide of a bevy of friends: John Q. Speedball, Meth Green, Mary Jane, My Palcohol, and often the mother of all companions, Fleetwood Smack. Rob Crow packed Living Well’s liner notes with pictures of his wife and baby. He sounds content and even coddled. Crow also — much like Dale Crover — looks like he started an all-chocolate-cake diet sometime in 2004. Not that his gustation habits are any of MY business, but some of his new music sounds loagy.
Strangely enough — or perhaps predictably? — Living Well is easily Crow’s most focused solo album consistency-wise. The songs don’t fight one another like red and black ants tossed into the same jar, they bleed into each other like a red stocking cap thrown in with a load of white socks. The result is an album that, much like Pinback’s 2004 full-length Summer in Abaddon, is more immediate in its appeal but suffers from repeated listens.
His instantly identifiable purr of a voice is fully intact, as is his quirky knack for pasting Riff B onto Drum Loop A and making the whole concoction sound singular. So what’s missing? Well, Crow’s Pinback cohort Zach Smith isn’t on hand to deliver his oddball bass riffs and vocals. And, since Living Well is the closest to Pinback Crow’s ever come as a solo artist, the holes are big enough for a king-sized prairie dog to scuttle into (to be fair, Smith’s similarly promising-but-bare solo debut Systems Officer suffered the same fate). He tempers this discrepancy with multiple layers of guitar and sometimes synth, but his six-string abilities were never tantamount to his appeal as an artist in the first place, and certainly don’t fully compensate here. Nevertheless, in songs like “Over Your Heart” and especially “Focus,” we hear Crow in top form. These tracks cause one to forget about Crow’s history and focus on the present-day; because of these bright spots it’s reasonable to expect a great deal from his next effort.
By dint of an on-again off-again success rate, what it comes down to is the age-old consideration of past appeal. If you dig Pinback this might hold you over until the next record. If you’ve liked Crow in the past — as I have — you’ll like Crow now — as I do, despite my hesitance to recommend this record to an outsider. An erratic performer in the past, if Crow brings this much focus to subsequent efforts it’s not unreasonable to predict a gradual ascent to the brilliance many have predicted for him since the days of Heavy Vegetable. As encouraging as Living Well is, he’s definitely not there yet.
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