Review: John Doe, For the Best of Us

For the Best of Us is just a footnote to the X legacy.

John Doe, For the Best of UsFor the Best of Us is a reissue of For the Rest of Us, an off-the-cuff EP the John Doe Thing project released on Kill Rock Stars in 1998. Even with five extra tracks, For the Best of Us is slim (just 35 minutes with a few throwaway tracks) and seems less like a discovery of a hidden treasure than Yep Roc cashing in on the minor success of X pseudo-frontman John Doe’s Forever Hasn’t Happened Yet last year. Like the other noisier releases that followed his promising country-based debut, 1990’s Meet John Doe, For the Rest of Us is a rowdy assortment of demo-quality barroom songs, spared from the mundane by Doe’s still-captivating shriek—such as when he howls “fuck it!” over the squall of “Bad, Bad Feeling.” For the Best of Us is just a footnote to the X legacy—more enjoyable than X member Exene Cervenka’s literary excursions, nowhere near as essential as the great documentary The Unheard Music—but not undeserving of a listen. After all, X’s leftovers are still tastier than the Arctic Monkeys’s entrees.

“A Step Outside” opened the original EP with a bluesy chorus equal parts country and crunchy, the overdubbed vocals acknowledging Doe’s classic duets with Cervenka and the simplistic but shimmery slide guitar shows just how great lo-fi rock can be. The rest of the EP maintains the melancholy mood but not the quality: there’s a pretty but forgettable instrumental called “Let’s Get Lost,” the merely okay slapdash rager “The Unhappy Song,” and the sparse ballad “This Loving Thing,” co-written with Dave Grohl. But the bonus tracks are better: “Criminal” and “Broken Smile” are both well crafted, grunge-influenced narratives and include some of the finest hooks on the record. A cover of Woody Guthrie’s “Vigilante Man” closes out the disc with a violent crawl not unlike some of Nick Cave’s spookier work to match the darkness of Guthrie’s lyrics (“Why does a vigilante man carry that sawed-off shotgun in his hand?/Would he shoot his brother and sister down?). “Vigilante Man” is the jam, and it’s quite a smart move on Yep Roc’s part, concluding a rather superfluous release with a track that makes the listener yearn for more.

Score: 
 Label: Yep Roc  Release Date: July 25, 2006  Buy: Amazon

Jimmy Newlin

James Newlin received his PhD in English from the University of Florida. His research is primarily concerned with the reception of Shakespeare in intellectual history, though he has also published articles on film and contemporary literature.

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