Mark Olson

The Salvation Blues | HackTone
By MIKAEL WOOD  |  August 28, 2007
2.0 2.0 Stars
inside_mark-olson---the-sal
This debut solo album by Mark Olson reflects on the former Jayhawks frontman’s divorce from singer-songwriter Victoria Williams, with whom he spent the late ’90s and early ’00s making records as the Creekdippers, a loose country-folk group based in the California desert near Joshua Tree. The Salvation Blues is, no surprise, something of a bummer. “I have wandered in the muck,” Olson announces straight off, in the opening “My Carol,” and in “The National Express” he admits, “Once I lost my self-respect/I was stranded and blue and all by myself.” Yet thanks in part to his peripatetic working method — he spent much of 2006 traveling the globe, with stops in Wales, Norway, and Poland — the album shimmers with the sort of musical detail that keeps woe-is-me songwriting from sounding (entirely) like a pity party. At least until the closer, “My One Book Philosophy,” in which he sings about becoming “a hobo in a hobo camp” while impersonating his ex-wife’s eccentric warble. That might be one for the private stash.

Mark Olson | Paradise Rock Club, 967 Comm Ave, Boston | September 2 | 617.931.2000
Related: Timothy Leary's dead, Mike Doughty, Déjà vu, More more >
  Topics: CD Reviews , Entertainment, Music, Pop and Rock Music,  More more >
| More

Most Popular
Blogs
 More: Phlog  |  Music  |  Film  |  Books  |  Politics  |  Media  |  Election '08  |  Free Speech  |  All Blogs
ARTICLES BY MIKAEL WOOD
Share this entry with Delicious
  •   THE CHEMICAL BROTHERS | FURTHER  |  July 07, 2010
    Astralwerks (2010)
  •   DEVO | SOMETHING FOR EVERYBODY  |  July 01, 2010
    Given the theory of de-evolution these Ohio brainiacs began expounding more than 30 years ago, it makes a sad kind of sense that Devo's first album since 1990's Smooth Noodle Maps offers such a charmless, base-level version of the band's synth-addled new wave.
  •   TAIO CRUZ | ROKSTARR  |  June 24, 2010
    When Taio Cruz sings, "I can't live without you," in "Take Me Back," pop-song conventions tell us he's referring to a lover.
  •   THE FUTUREHEADS | THE CHAOS  |  June 16, 2010
    "I wish that I could stop the noise," sings Barry Hyde not long into The Chaos . It sure doesn't seem that way.
  •   BETTYE LAVETTE | INTERPRETATIONS: THE BRITISH ROCK SONGBOOK  |  June 01, 2010
    Bettye LaVette’s previous two albums had titles that required a little digging to unpack.

 See all articles by: MIKAEL WOOD

LATEST SLIDESHOWS

All Slideshows