By Robert Allen

That The Walkabouts are the most underappreciated band in Seattle has been a given for many years. If you're good enough to have your records released in Europe, you're good enough to have them out here. With Devil's Road we'll have to call them, perhaps, the most underappreciated band in America.

Sometimes outsiders can see things more clearly than people whose faces are pushed up against the glass. Europeans view The Walkabouts as the thematic (if not musical) successors to The' Band, a group whose explorations of an America lost and found and lost again conjure up a country straining to live up to its ideals. The drifters, union organizers, and circus barkers that populate Devil's Road once again prove Chris Eckman's ability to peg our national psyche.

What makes Devil's Road different from the last half-dozen marvelous Walkabouts records is the incorporation of the Warsaw Philharmonic Orchestra on half the tracks. Generally, strings and rock don't mix, unless you're Jimmy Page, but on Devil's Road, the strings never overwhelm the songs. "The Light Will Stay On," possibly the most beautiful track The Walkabouts have ever done, uses strings as a counterpoint rather than a sweetener. Keyboardist Glenn Slater understands why silent films used pianos for comedies and organs for melodramas; pitted against the strings, he provides a human foil.

If there's a down side to the record, it's that Eckman's guitar is mixed too low, and that the format lends itself to too many mid-tempo plodders. Still, that's a minor quibble. The Walkabouts started out as a great band, and they've only gotten better. Carla Torgerson's vocals have matured over the years; "The Leaving Kind" requires a balance between resignation and unwarranted hope that Torgerson carries off perfectly.

Precious few American bands have approached the Walkabouts' consistency of quality and quantity over the past several years, It's criminal that almost no one here has heard them.

Recorded at the Conny Plank studio near Cologne, previously the temporary abode of Kraftwerk, Devo and Can, and produced by Victor Van Vugt, the man responsible for co-vocalists Chris Eckman and Carla Torgerson's fabulously melancholic "Life Full Of Holes", "Devil's Road" sees the band attain an apotheosis of sorts, finally fully evoking the desolate space and grandeur of Nowheresville, USA.

Veering between the slow, slow descent of the heartcrushing lament, "Christmas Valley", the sweet claustrophobia of "The Light Will Stay On", the Hammond blast of "Fairground Blues" and the late-night bar-room soul of "When Fortune Smiles", often bursting into their trademark squalls of scuzz-rock distortion, this album is instantly familiar without ever seeming hoary. With its sparkling, plummeting piano and ghostly acoustic strum thrust skyward by the restrained power of the Warsaw Philharmonic Orchestra (this is one lush sound), with tracks on the very verge of slipping into "Losing My Religion" or Cave's mighty "Red Right Hand", and Eckman's dusty, world-weary rasp conjuring images of the first half hour of "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre", it takes from impeccable, hazily-remembered sources and, like Oasis' "What's the Story", becomes immediately seminal in itself.

With violin courtesy of Diction from Tindersticks (who, along with R.E.M.'s Peter Buck, were heavily involved in "Life Full of Holes"), "Devil's Road" is a startling success, the best of a band already consistently superb.

Utterly, undeniably brilliant.

--The Stud Brothers
(Thanks to Tony K. for transcribing and sending this review!)

Time Out (London), Feb.14-21 1996:

Q Magazine, May 1996:

Vox, May 1996:

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