Ashamed – Deer Tick
My best of 2008 list featured a number of folk-driven (dare I say, Dylan-esque) acts. Here’s another one which missed making the cut, but nevertheless contains a number of very fine down-home touched and nasally-vocal songs. Deer Tick is really just John McCauley, just 20 years old, though you wouldn’t guess it from the way this record sounds. War Elephant has the feel of someone who has been on the road for years and see his fair share of misplaced desires, dirty bars, and empty highways.
At 14 tracks, it’s a bit longer than necessary, producing a few trips into nonessential generic indie-influenced alt-country or into tracks that wish they had been written by Tom Waits. The second half is particularly susceptible to this problem, with only “Diamond Rings 2007” feeling like it belongs in the same class with the first eight tracks. However, on the good tracks (“Dirty Dishes” for example), you can hear every bit of the pain and sadness. And there are few finer songs along these lines than the opener “Ashamed” which trundles along a lightly-picked guitar line until the final twenty seconds when the drums enter for just a second: as if only to show you what you can never quite touch.