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| Pitchfork |
![Jayhawks - Hollywood Town Hall [Expanded Edition] / Tomorrow the Green Grass [Legacy Edition] review](http://www.sweetslyrics.com/poze/jayhawks200.gif) The liner notes to the Jayhawks' career-making 1992 album, Hollywood Town Hall, were written by friend-of-the-band Joe Henry, then a struggling musician himself (and now one of the most prolific producers around). In just a few short paragraphs, Henry evokes not so much the music made by the Minneapolis band, but presumably what the music was about: wayward drifters with sad histories who disappeared, hitting the road in search of better times. The Jayhawks were never so down on their luck as their characters, but they were drifters just the same, ostensibly headquartered in the Twin Cities but always traveling to the next show and the next show after that. In the late 1980s and early 90s, they stayed on the road almost constantly, paying their dues and gradually playing to larger and larger audiences. They were alt-country merely by coincidence, gestating in isolation and predating the movement by several years. The band incorporated a wide range of styles and influences into their stately Americana, not just country and certainly not punk, but classic rock, folk, power pop, and lots of feedback from Gary Louris fuzzbox-filtered guitar-- all seemingly absorbed with every mile of road traveled and every city played.What the Jayhawks never drifted toward was success-- at least not the kind that they and their fans felt the music warranted. Even so, a full 25 years after forming, the Jayhawks don't come across as also-rans, which is itself a minor miracle. Hollywood Town Hall and Tomorrow the Green Grass still live and breathe, and these two new, long-awaited reissues sound like the logical conclusions of a legacy-shaping campaign that began with 2009's career retrospective, Music From the North Country. Neither of these albums was a hit, exactly, but they have endured to become something more impressive. They show the Jayhawks unmoored from any one particular trend or style, devising new ways to combine roots and rock without skimping on either. Hollywood Town Hall is, appropriately, a good road-trip album, moving from pre-dawn departure ("Waiting for the Sun") to a hard-won destination ("Martin's Song", with its chorus, "I've been working all night, I go long into day"). Louris' guitar cuts elegant swathes through these songs, and the new remaster brings out the rich tones in the instruments themselves, especially Benmont Tench's organ on "Crowded in the Wings". The songs have a greater live feel, but Hollywood Town Hall remains primarily a vocal album, with the harmonies of Louris and Olson at the center. Their approach is based on old-time country sibling acts like the Louvin and Stanley Brothers, yet those tightly intertwined vocals are reset in a dusty, electrified setting, marking perhaps the Jayhawks' greatest innovation....full text |
| Thephoenix |
| The reedy voices of Mark Olson and Gary Louris are why the Jayhawks stood out from the '90s alt-country crowd - two inextricably linked stalks of lonesome beauty, they remain impossible to discern from each other, impossible to peel apart. The Jayhawks also made some of the best harmony-laden, Fuzz Face–soaked, post-cosmic American music of that decade, so, you know, that helps. Hollywood Town Hall, with moody minor-key rockers "Waiting for the Sun" and "Wichita" (and the swift hands of session men Benmont Tench and Nicky Hopkins), is the group's best, but the more adventurous Tomorrow the Green Grass (their last with Olson) is nearly as good. On the eve of a reunion tour and a new studio album, both modern classics are revisited as separate deluxe reissues - which means not only outtakes and B-sides like the rocking "Leave No Gold," the country ditty "Keith and Quentin," and the gospel staple "Up Above My Head," but an entire disc of acoustic demos to accompany Tomorrow the Green Grass. On that, the voices of Olson and Louris are laid exceedingly bare - we're talkin' cassette-tape, woodsheddingly bare - and it's a fitting way to reintroduce a band built upon that very stuff. Although if it makes you feel more comfortable to smother it all with gnarly SG feedback, you'll find that here too...full text |
| Blogcritics |
| Back when it was originally released in 1992, the Jayhawks' Hollywood Town Hall was just about as unlikely a candidate to become the sort of classic whose lasting influence continues to this day as you could possibly imagine. At the time, rock music was still dominated by the post-punk sounds of Seattle grunge bands like Nirvana and Pearl Jam, and the adult-alternative radio format which would later embrace them was still very much in its infancy. Yet, if you were to pinpoint a defining moment in time where the term "alt-country" was pretty much invented in the modern sense, the Jayhawks Hollywood Town Hall is probably it. The album is today regarded (at least by those in the know) as an alt-country classic. A beautiful record both then and now, the Jayhawks' debut album for the big leagues with Rick Rubin's Def American Recordings (the Minneapolis based band had previously recorded albums for indie labels like Twin Tone), is as perfect a marriage between the country twang of Gram Parsons and the Flying Burrito Brothers and the elegant grandeur of Robbie Robertson and the Band as it gets. It also serves as a crucial flashpoint for just where the so-called "alt-country" genre would eventually go with bands like Wilco and with such albums as Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. Although it could be convincingly argued that Jeff Tweedy and company eventually took it much further, it was in fact the Jayhawks who paved the way....full text |
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