Alberta Cross – Broken Side of Time
Ark Recordings
Words: James Passarelli
Alberta Cross’ debut LP Broken Side of Time joins the ranks of albums that defy categorization, not because of unorthodoxy, but simply because it feels inadequate to call it what it is: a rock album. Sure, you’ve heard it a million times before. “Our music is just straight up rock ‘n’ roll, man.” “We play pure rock, the way it was meant to be played.” But Broken Side is one of a scant supply of records to which these claims legitimately apply.
Critics will tell you that Alberta Cross is living in the wrong decade, that they’d be more comfortable in the 60’s or 70’s – an era stocked with gritty blues-rock. And while such assertions are intended as compliments, they imply some sort of identity crisis. Make no mistake, Alberta Cross knows exactly what year it is, and they have no qualms about splicing the spirit of early rock and soul legends with contemporary alternative and punk influences.
The album is crafted with crests and troughs of volume and potency, but it doesn’t have that trite sense of forced song alternating (slow, fast, slow, fast). Instead it provides a natural varied flow, a quality easily conceived but difficultly executed. The opening track is an honest ballad titled “Song 3Three Blues,” the record’s most laid back and purely rock track. They follow it up with the heavily charged electric jam “ATX” a song that hints at the band’s occasional arena-rock personality. Organs play a subtle lead role in “City Walls” and a buildup of layered forceful guitar riffs and take control of the title track.
Lead man Petter Stakee’s steady angelic wails thread together the otherwise disparate tracks, and a sense of displacement haunts his lyrics. “Come on take me home ‘cause I just wanna feel,” he cries on “ATX.” In the concluding “Ghost of City Life,” Stakee shares his frustration with facades: “How about believing/How about some faith…how about some truth now, honey oh?” He isn’t always so clear with his motives, however, delivering cryptic lines such as “woman I see war/is that not a way to define low?/you may think I’m weak/well I had a wild wild summer.” It’s often near impossible to make out his words, and this only adds to the album’s dense mystique. The peak of the album comes when Stakee replaces his electric guitar with a tambourine, and Terry Wolfers’ spellbinding bass takes charge. “Let’s try a little soul,” they’ve been known to introduce the number before playing it on stage, and soulful it is. Stakee begins with a series of quivering “wooohooo”s that would send shivers down Nina Simone’s spine.
The shortcomings of the album are two and far between. “Old Man Chicago” and “The Thief and the Heartbreaker” were the only two tracks taken from earlier material, and their more electric-focused recreations fail to do proper justice to their originals. (The original acoustic version of “The Thief and the Heartbreaker” is quite possibly their greatest composition to date.) One can certainly understand the change – of course, they had to be altered and refined for the sake of the album’s cohesion, but the prototypes surpass the reproductions.
It’s easy to dissect such an album on any number of irrelevant criteria – the band members’ seemingly incompatible backgrounds, its relation to apparent blues-rock influences, the images it conjures – and it’s impossible to reach a verdict independent of such preconceptions. But a true judgment of the album in isolation says about it now what it will in 30 years, when artists at the turn of the century will have produced music as distant as Woodstock seems now. It’s an invigorating anomaly – not a throwback, but a classic rock album in a musical time and setting where the word “classic” has all but lost its meaning. Alberta Cross’ thrilling debut, more than anything else, displays their idiosyncratic knack for transforming rootsy blues and folk rock by not changing a thing.
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