“A day in the life of Festus, Missouri,” is the way the Bottle Rockets’ Brian Henneman laughingly describes his band’s second album, The Brooklyn Side. This quotidian panorama is of ceaseless interest to Henneman. “Festus is getting bigger than it used to be,” he reflects. “It’s got to be 10,000 people. It’s practically a suburb. It’s getting there, and they won’t rest until it does.” The Brooklyn Side, he laughs, is about “the way it works every single day down here. If you listen to the record 365 times, it would be just as boring as a year in the life of Festus.”
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While the band’s first, eponymous album was full of impeccable country rock in a similar setting, The Brooklyn Side is much more focused. It’s a gimlet-eyed song cycle on rural themes that encompasses harmless idiosyncrasies (watching “championship fishing on channel five”) and some more lethal ones (like wife beating). The Brooklyn Side is about things like just how small small-town battles can be (“Radar Gun”) and how hard it is for the inarticulate to articulate something like love (“Gravity Fails”). The Bottle Rockets aren’t afraid to distance themselves critically from their fellows in the bloody “What More Can I Do?” and the desperate ennui of “Stuck in a Rut.” But ultimately, first in the irresistible sing-along “I Wanna Come Home” and finally in the bar-ballad-with-a-twist “Queen of the World,” they find themselves where they started and where they belong: back home.
For the Bottle Rockets, Henneman recruited guitarist Tom Parr and drummer Mark Ortmann, who go back with him to old Festus groups like Chicken Truck and the Blue Moons. Bassist Tom Ray is also in Poi Dog Pondering. Like Uncle Tupelo, the band have a fan base in Chicago: they’re playing a show Friday at Schubas after an in-store at Tower, and will be back next month at FitzGerald’s.
The band backs up the concept with tunes. Take “Gravity Fails,” the album’s giddy pop confection. “That’s something I’d never done before,” Henneman says. “I don’t even know how that came out. Scott said, ‘Make it like a pop hit, make the music fit the lyrics.’” There’s also friendly, loping ballads (Henneman’s “I’ll Be Comin’ Around”) and full-bore rockers, most notably the grinding “1000 Dollar Car” and the thunderous “Sunday Sports,” with its priceless picture of the armchair sportsman (and a cameo by the bowling term that gives the album its title).
She’s got an itemized list of everything she loathes.
