Album Review
Quite often, the music that an artist plays on-stage and records in the studio only reflects a part of what he/she listens to at home. Someone who plays alternative metal on-stage might go home after the concert and listen to Sarah McLachlan or Shawn Colvin; someone who plays in a Celtic band might have a lot of gangsta rap CDs at home. And side projects come about when artists feel an overwhelming need to play something other than what they are best known for. Although guitarists Mick Mullin and Randy Garvine and drummer Dan Ballinger played metal in the band Superhighway Carfire, their side project Slacks (which became a bigger and bigger focus as time passed) is far from metal. Terrestrial, Slacks' second album, favors a style of alternative folk-rock that is twangy, countrified, and earthy but is also spacy and mildly eccentric; Slacks have some of the jam band thing going on (five of the seven tracks are instrumentals), and their work has a definite psychedelic edge. Critic Pete Soyer described Slacks' recordings as music "that mountain men would make in a one-room cabin 80 miles deep into the wilderness," and in fact, Terrestrial does favor a very rural, pastoral type of sound. But the "mountain men" that this 26-minute CD evokes are not simplistic thinkers; they are inquisitive, probing, introspective mountain men whose musical tastes range from bluegrass and alternative country to Neil Young to the Allman Brothers to Pink Floyd. That is an intriguing combination of influences, and it works well for Slacks on this enjoyable and chance-taking, if brief, release.
