By Jesse Cataldo
There’s a statistic somewhere that places stock-brokers as a profession with one of the highest suicide rates. Why? Even with their six figure salaries, they eventually come to the realization that they’re not doing anything significant or appreciated, and their job basically boils down to high risk games of chance with other people’s money. What does this say about music critics, or just critics in general? Is all this nit-picking and fussing about quality and really helping anything? Are we wasting our time analyzing miniscule facets of popular music when we could be outside feeding the ducks or planting flowers? One thing’s for sure, there would be a lot more problems, if not for the general consensus among critics that personal opinion is their divine gift to the masses.
It’s albums like Route 23 that force a critic to think long and hard about who they’re writing for and what they’re trying to achieve by doing it. An album like this has a very limited possible fan base, and despite being awarded the title of 2004 Bluegrass album of the year, isn’t really that great. This leaves it in a hard to define middle ground, and leaves the reviewer with no angle from which to approach it.
Who’s going to appreciate this? Country fans definitely won’t. In its rush to create a twangier facsimile of the pop music world, modern country rushed out of its roots on horseback, taking along only its cowboy hat and a cooler full of cheap beer and misbegotten woe. Unfortunately, it left behind all the really important stuff, strong southern values like pride in the face of soul-crushing suffering. This change renders music like bluegrass a thing of the past, a fixture of a Faulknerian world of hard times and bad luck. This is the lonely, forgotten realm where Chatham County Line exists. The same where lonely bluesmen toiled through years on the road, and banjos and fiddles rattle off raucous party tunes without a self-effacing “redneck” wink.
At the same time, Route 23 is too obscure and provincial, and not ironic enough to fit anywhere within the indie scene. You can tell without even listening to the music, by the beards the members display on the inside of the CD booklet. The beards they wear are too thin and practical to make a fashion statement; they look like they’re there just to keep a face warm on a cold Kentucky night.
Ultimately, Chatham County Line finds itself slipped between the tiniest of cracks. The question is, is there anybody who cares enough to find it in there?