More and more of you are realizing you’ve been duped, like that dreaded childhood moment when mom revealed that your favorite mystery meal actually contained your sworn arch nemesis, eggplant.
Mojave have been slowly feeding you a sugared-up dose of country, and what’s more, you’re liking it, no matter how desperately you try to convince yourself otherwise. But don’t be afraid. There are others like you. They too rocked dreamily to bands like My Bloody Valentine in the ’90s. And those before them created that vague “alt-country” thing, as Mojave singer Neil Halstead jokes, “So it’s kind of cooler.”
“The thing that attracted me to that scene were people like Uncle Tupelo and Palace Brothers,” Halstead explains. “They have the same sort of attitude as people I saw in bands when I was 16. I don’t know if punk rock is the right way to describe it, but it’s not a traditional attitude to be playing that sort of music. It’s far from that.”
So it’s time to stop pretending that the steel guitar so prevalent on Excuses is really just some newfangled rock distortion pedal. Mojave 3’s quiet, wistful songs about drifting, heartbreak and a Kansas stripper longing to make it big in Vegas deserve better than that.
“We’re quite an unusual proposition, an English band that uses a pedal steel,” Halstead says, explaining the general murk of genre confusion the band’s recent work has inspired among critics and fans obsessed with classification. “I don’t think what we do is particularly unique, but there’s probably a sensibility to it that’s different from American bands playing the sort of music that we do.”
While American bands – like Halstead’s comparison of choice, Wilco – approximate Mojave’s country leanings, the sensibility Halstead refers to is a unique sort of warmth, the residue of the dreamy quality Slowdive embraced that many alt-country bands don’t quite capture.
Even so, Halstead remains reluctant to promote his own music. As for bands that do claim originality, he quips, “Well, they’re fucking liars.”
Ultimately, Mojave has evolved from ethereal electronic layers and a guy who didn’t like country until he was 24 into a Neil-Young-covering, banjo- and flugelhorn-playing jamboree.
Yeah, it seems strange, but somehow, it’s working. That little voice in your head is telling you so. Don’t ignore it – after all, it was right about the eggplant. nyou
