One of the few, if only, remaining alt-country bands from the 1990s with their original lineup intact—not to mention the most consistently active—the Old 97’s are a living relic. They don’t seem one bit ashamed of it, armed with the standard two guitars, bass, and drums, and still playing the same sort of semi-twangy barroom rock songs about drinking, women, the road, and drinking with women on the road. And the fact that they’ve remained, in non-pandemic times, a popular touring act for nearly 30 years without making any major or lasting changes to its approach speaks to the appeal of their original formula.
Just as remarkable is the fact that after all this time, Miller and his cohorts don’t sound jaded in the least: The band’s 12th album, predictably titled Twelfth, is largely defined by the singer’s surprising positivity in the face of, not only the troubled times of the present, but decades of life on the road. Miller delves into the past often throughout the album, from the young-love nostalgia of “Our Year” to the self-referential tribute to the band’s early years of “The Dropouts,” which isn’t the first such song Miller has written in recent years. There’s even a cheeky nod to one of the group’s few other still-active contemporaries, the Bottle Rockets, in the form of a honky-tonk shit-kicker titled “Bottle Rocket Baby.”
This backwards-facing view may seem a little on the nose for a band that’s not doing much of anything new musically, once again pairing the plainspoken barroom wit of Miller’s lyrics with Ken Bethea’s revved-up guitar work. As usual, the latter dominates so much of the mix that it may take a couple of listens to realize there’s barely a single distinguishable riff to be found across the album’s 12 tracks. But when Bethea pulls the ripcord on that heavy bottomless-pit tremolo effect for the dramatic moments, it nearly makes up for it.
Still, that also means that there’s not much to latch onto beyond Miller’s melodies and lyrics, both of which are entirely shopworn but at times winsome nonetheless. On “Turn off the TV,” which recalls the band’s past forays into power pop, Miller portrays the same sort of dorky pick-up artist who sang one of the best-loved Old 97’s songs, “Barrier Reef”: “Turn off the TV, let’s go back to my room/I’ve got a window with a hell of a view.” On the slow, hazy “I Like You Better,” he compares a paramour favorably with the exact things you’d expect a dude in a cowboy band to love the most: sleeping in, playing guitar, and drinking beer. “We got nothing/But nothing’s good enough for the dropouts,” Miller sings on “The Dropouts,” which might well serve as a decent rallying cry for casualties of the Covid economy.
Miller isn’t always so glib though. He got sober five years ago, which he does address on Twelfth, albeit with little depth. When he sings, “And the wine turns into whiskey/And the whiskey turns to tears/It’s been this way for years,” on “Absence (What We’ve Got),” it’s both sharp and revealing. Conversely, “Confessional Boxing” offers mostly surface-level hints at the dark times of the past, as the song growls but doesn’t ever bite. Miller fares better when he’s in pure storytelling mode on the after-hours waltz “Belmont Hotel,” on which the titular hotel becomes a metaphor for romantic renewal: “The ceilings were charred and the air thick with fumes/Now there’s a garden where bluebonnets bloom/And it’s better than brand new now.” You could say, then, that for the Old 97’s, all that’s old is new again.
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