Keith Pille's Weekly Shuffle
12.5.05

Every week, I will fire up the Shuffle Songs option on my iPod; the first song to come up, no matter what it is, will get an instant, unvarnished review. We're at the mercy of random chance and the limits of my digital music collection. Let's see where this takes us.

Whiskey Bottle
Uncle Tupelo, No Depression

Uncle Tupelo are one of my favorite bands. To be honest, it's tough to imagine that changing-- they have an almost impossible-to-beat mix of instrumental virtuosity, gutfelt emotional intensity, great voices (Ok, Tweedy's is kind of weak on the first three albums, but it's charmingly weak), and, when they chose to bust it out, an unparalleled capacity to rock you to your fucking core.

"Whiskey Bottle" is not a song that will rock you to your fucking core. I'd go so far as to say it's a pretty heavy downer, especially on an album that is otherwise the most punk of all of the UT offerings. back in the day, I held up Tupelo's ability to slip a cry-in-your-beer number in between the rockers as their greatest strength, the proof that they were a band of substance. And I guess that's still true, but these days I feel more inclined just to rock. Life will offer you enough opportunities to cry into your beer that you don't really need music to prompt it.

Still, "Whiskey Bottle" is a great song, one of the best encapsulations of the trapped feeling of small-town life ever to come from a band that specialized in that sort of thing. Jay Farrar is second only to Johnny Cash in the Unbelievably Low Voice of Truth department, and it's perfectly suited to the material here. This song is so convincing that, during most of my last year of college, I just expected that adult life would be a depressing stretch of working on factory belts and emptying whiskey bottles (depressing, yeah, but it sure motivated me to carpe the diem at the time; and it was a hell of a relief to be proved wrong).

Besides, how can you go wrong with a song that has Jay Farrar yelling, "Liquor and guns!"?

Weekly Shuffle Scoreboard (Best to Worst):

1. "Rock N Roll Radio V2," Derailleur
2. "Back from Somewhere (live)," Husker Du
3. "Powderfinger," Neil Young
4. "Sliver (live)," Nirvana
5. "Whiskey Bottle," Uncle Tupelo
6. "Gassed & Stoked," Lou Reed
7. "Nicotine & Gravy," Beck
8. "I Am Trying to Break Your Heart (live)," Wilco
9. "The Calming Sea," Beachwood Sparks
10. "John, I'm Only Dancing," David Bowie
11. "Take It or Leave it," The Strokes
12. "Monkey Dot," Money Mark
13. "I Wanted to Tell You," Matthew Sweet
14. "Soldier's Joy," Mark O'Connor
15. "Masoko Tanga," The Police
16. "Scenery," Neil Young and Pearl Jam
17. "We Got The," The Beastie Boys
18. "The Big Foist," The Minutemen
19. "Climbing up the Walls," Radiohead
20. "That's When I Reach for My Revolver," Mission of Burma