Days of the New
Days of the New II
(Outpost)
Wild horses charge at the listener from some distant point on the horizon, a shriek rises from amid the pounding hooves, and a baritone voice intones, "Pain is my pill" -- and that's only the first minute and a half of Days of the New's second album. The Louisville, Kentucky, group's twenty-year-old deep thinker, Travis Meeks, comes by subtlety only reluctantly. If he has a sense of humor, it's well hidden, and he keeps his personal-intensity meter on the blowtorch setting. Meeks may be earnest, but he isn't mild -- his music isn't just big, it's daring -- shotgunning in a dozen directions at once.
About the only thing Days of the New II shares with its equally hard-hitting but relatively one-dimensional predecessor is its title. That 1997 album had the feel of a post-grunge sorting-out, a young songwriter searching for his voice while still under the spell of Alice in Chains and Pearl Jam. After scrapping his old four-piece rock band, Meeks has come back with a richer, more expansive approach that suggests the soundtrack for an unmade psychodrama. Working title: "Travis Reborn."
"The world is a pea / No, it don't revolve around me / If anything, I revolve around the world," he sings on "Last One," a howler worthy of Jim Morrison at his most self-indulgent. But in writing and producing the album and playing many of the instruments, Meeks compensates with knee-buckling dynamics and inventive instrumental voicings, coloring the arrangements with lavish orchestrations, layered voices, Eastern percussion, American Indian chanting, fiddle solos, and rhythm loops. The songs bleed into one another, emphasizing a sense of journey that grows more durable with each listen.
Though Meeks is still sometimes guilty of bludgeoning a tune like a Sub Pop wanna-be, he has learned how to leave a few holes for more-ambiguous emotions. And the music is often strikingly beautiful: the latticework of acoustic guitars on "Enemy"; the rivers of percussion that engulf "Skeleton Key"; the wordless female vocals that snake through "Bring Yourself"; the counterpoint brass and string melodies that close "Provider."
Meeks' ambition sometimes outruns his abilities. He could have simply remade his platinum-plus debut to cement his status as a rock star. Instead, Days of the New II comes off like a bold, if flawed, progress report from an artist in the midst of a head-spinning transition.
Greg Kot
