Ladyhawk - "Shots"

Ladyhawk - Ghost Blues (Jagjaguwar 2008)

Ladyhawk - Shots / Jagjaguwar

With a recent string of successes in Bon Iver, Black Mountain and Richard Youngs, Jagjaguwar has been on form lately. Their dusty take on Americana continues with Ladyhawk and their second long-player in Shots. This record has been out since March 4th, and for a very brief while it felt like they were everywhere promoting it, but just as quickly as it appeared as a whiskey-stained sidekick to In the Future, it has all but disappeared. And it is generally agreed in these parts that Black Mountain are very good and that British Columbia is blossoming right now with all sorts of throwback bands, but what is it about Ladyhawk that has let people slip past them?

Maybe it's just the everyman attitude that this record shouts out with on crowd bait like "You Ran." 20 Jagjaguwar records ago on Ladyhawk's self-titled debut, JAG097 fell over, got right back up, cried on shoulders and folded the day in halves, watching the sun come up over the dashboard. JAG117 feels different. They may still be falling over and getting right back up, but rather than crying on shoulders, Shots is the sound of a shaken fist through bitter tears at the ones you used to love (and maybe still do). Or maybe, as they put it, it's simply the band howling at the moon.

The anger, then, is less nuanced and textured. It is now more straightforward, delivered straight to the mouth with the distortion and feedback of a less circumspect Lucero. The album is 39 minutes, punctual, succinct, full of bile n' bitter. But that doesn't mean they've sold everything subtle away for anthemic apes of The Hold Steady. Having listened to this album for a few weeks now, even this album's better moments in "S.T.H.D." or "Faces of Death," already a step well above the average bar-band standard, provide the filling for a sandwich whose bread is the best part.

That's an awkward analogy, but even if you've already heard the barnburning broken synth-assisted "I Don't Always Know What You're Thinking," give the closer "Ghost Blues" another go. To me, "Ghost Blues" is where Shots comes together at the last gasp, maybe even just the dying minute of its ten-minute run-time. It's where Ladyhawk's push-pull argument between foot-stomping y'allternative and considered country sludge meets the dusty trail to close with as emphatic an ending as the band could possibly have hoped to come up with. It's the summation in one song of what Ladyhawk does for an entire record. Maybe it isn't a critic's darling like In the Future, but I would argue that Shots might in fact be the better, more consistent album (even though they're different bands going in different directions). I've grown to like it a lot in these past few weeks, and if you ignored it for whatever reason, I urge you to return and see what you might've missed the first time around.