Rhett Miller is in love. He’s in love in a way that appeals to cynic and romanticalike. He’s so damn in love he can make all 12 songs on his new album, The Instigator, love songs. While references to the likes of Kafka, Air Supply and the works of Don DeLillo might ensure that his songs won’t find wide radio play anytime soon, each of Miller’s love songs is crafted to be instantly singable even if you have yet to learn the words.
Miller is best known as the lead singer of the Old 97s, a Dallas quartet whose punk influence and Texas twang has put it among the best of the alt-country world. The band’s early albums Wreck Your Life and Too Far to Care blended country jangle and punk simplicity. However, later albums such as 1999’s Fight Songs and particularly last year’s Satellite Rides traded punk for pop sensibility and also began to score the band some notoriety. But that trade didn’t hamper the music?it improved it. While some fans longed for a sound that was as much Hank Williams as it was Mick Jones, they instead got musicians trading in their adolescent guitar tears for more adult studio craftsmanship.
This pop sound comes through clearly on Miller’s solo debut. Though the Texas and country influences remain, especially in the opening guitar riffs on several of the album’s songs, the pacing, chords and pleading of the singer all highlight the role new production values have played. Miller has produced an album whose rough country edges have been sanded down by studio orchestration. However, amid the cascading guitars and ratcheting drums one can still hear a few raw country licks. Many of the songs like “Come Around” and “World Inside the World” bring to mind songs sung to acoustic accompaniment by a man unheeded on stage at a back-road turn-off joint. But at the next moment, one will be bopping along to the rapid pop of “This is What I Do” and laughing at the rocking country boy falling in love with a science teacher on “Four-Eyed Girl.” Even “Terrible Vision,” with its cowboy-ballad pacing, has multi-layered vocals that keep the song from sounding as if Miller is playing while riding his white horse through town. And the vibraphone on “Hover” should be enough to let you know that this ain’t an Old 97s album.
Lyrically, one may wonder whether Miller’s life has been nothing but a Promethean succession of women ripping his heart out right after he had grown it to love each one, the monotony of subject matter is no detriment to the music. The Instigator is not Somerset Maugham’s Of Human Bondage put to catchy pop rifts. You do feel for the guy, you really want him to find someone to love him, but it’s not quite a heart-rending plea.
Nonetheless, Rhett Miller wants you to fall in love with him as much as he is in love with every woman on every one of his songs, right down to the beaten puppy look he exhibits on the album cover. However, even if his love isn’t particularly complex, or if it is slowly pulling away from its roots, it is still playful, joyous and yearning. What is left is a man and an album that might not be amazing, but are loveable regardless.
