I and Love and You vs. Harvest

It's nice to have an oranges and oranges matchup rather than an apples and oranges matchup. For the purposes of putting things in a convenient box, I'm going to lump both of these albums into my invented category, "faux-hick." I would define faux-hick as rural-aware music made by people who are from or sound like they're from the city. This isn't meant as a demeaning label, but it makes me feel like I'm in some special place of judgement as one who comes from a small town (granted, one who comes from a small town where he grew up listening to crappy music that was pretty faux, but decidedly un-hick).

Now that I've established my special position, Neil Young's Harvest vs. The Avett Brothers' I and Love and You:

I had heard of the Avett Brothers, but never listened to them before. I was kind of excited to hear something new in the faux hick world, being a big Wilco, etc. fan and I definitely enjoyed the beginning of the listen. As it went on, though, I got kind of bored mixed with kind of annoyed at how the music seemed to be jumping from reference to reference and I found myself writing notes that start with, "a little too much like..." Buddy Holly in Slight Figure of Speech, John Prine in Incomplete and Insecure, Townes Van Zandt in Ten Thousand Words, and a little scream in Heart Like a Kick Drum that sounded like the singer had practiced for hours to sound like Jeff Tweedy. Probably the part that annoyed me the most was the jumpy half of The Perfect Space. The song is emotive in a swingy sort of way until it devolves into Sweet Home Alabama played on a Casio keyboard. Throughout the album there are segments of one or two acoustic guitars noodling around that I enjoyed at first, but started to sound like those annoying guys at the guitar shop who sit and play uninspired Eric Clapton Unplugged licks for hours.

That said, I have this problem where I stand by music that I somehow feel I've discovered, even if it sucks and tend to first reject music that someone else tells me to listen to. For instance, I stuck with Son Volt far past their prime and was really into some of John Prine's crappier music for quite a while. So I started to listen to this album again, but remained kind of bored. Then I looked them up on Wikipedia and saw that Rick Rubin produced the album, and that made me feel a little embarassed because I'm supposed to like everything he touches since he did such a great job with late Johnny Cash.

But no matter how good the Avett Brothers are, Neil Young's Harvest has a few things in its favor that I can't really escape: I first came into contact with Harvest at the prime age of young-man-music-stamping-on-brain: 19ish. Then I listened to this album and After the Gold Rush on two sides of a cassette tape for an entire Christmas break while driving around backroads in Missouri trying to be more rural and authentic.

The steel guitar on On the Weekend just kills me. Young's lyrics are truly mysterious at times and at others, frank recollections of the transition from adolescence to early adulthood. They seem to come from a place of just coming into contact with adulthood and feeling like you see it for what it really is. Kind of invigorating.

I will say that I've never been a big fan of Are You Ready for the Country, which seems kind of thrown together and naive, but Old Man is a really amazing song and There's a World adds a wonderful variety to the album with its orchestral craziness.

I realize I'm not saying nearly as much about how great Harvest is compared to how much I'm saying about how I'm not crazy about I and Love and You, but greatness is typically less quantifiable than mediocreness, right?

Winner: Harvest