Mom-ford and sons?
[Video]
[6.22]
Alfred Soto: Remember Ricky Skaggs? He recorded studious and professional simulacra of classic bluegrass. This is competent.
[5]
Scott Mildenhall: With the lyrical references meaning little, they all just merge into one sketchily constructed idea of Dusty America, one that still doesn’t sound very exciting. There’s little pain in this, little depth — “a half-written story” seems about right. It could easily just be an homage by a niche pub act from Boston (Lincolnshire).
[4]
Jonathan Bradley: I don’t really mind that these guys are only pretending to be Depression-era drifters; I suspect Daft Punk might only be pretending to be robots. Theater is theater and these studio hillbillies pantomime a terribly agreeable mix of olde-timey fiddle-licks and accordion with their nonsense about cowgirls and rodeos. It’s far more modest in execution than “Wagon Wheel,” which has achieved an unlikely status as a kind of modern day standard, but that’s because stringing together a list of dot points from the Rand McNally can’t always result in rambling man pathos. Amarillo’s only contribution to this tune is as a mellifluous collection of syllables, but demanding more of Old Crow Medicine Show than lovely noise will only draw your gaze to a sepia abyss that can never stare back.
[6]
Patrick St. Michel: Old Crow Medicine Show must have felt stung by watching Darius Rucker turn “Wagon Wheel” into a country hit, so they are once again revamping one of Bob Dylan’s sketches into something all their own. “Sweet Amarillo” is a stomping waltz that’s a fun little fiddle-and-accordion-heavy affair, if nothing much more. Who’s going to turn it into a big success?
[6]
Brad Shoup: The placenames come hard and fast; I guess Dylan was holed up with a road atlas. OCMS connect the dots with Cajun fiddle and a reasonably ramshackle waltz time. It’s a lot of pretty nothing, a general holler that sounds venerable, or maybe just common.
[6]
Jer Fairall: Polishing another Dylan castoff, these only somewhat reverent traditionalists do the song the justice that The Man Himself was unlikely to deliver in his uneven late-period. Imagine Dylan wheezing his way through this over a rinky-dink Modern Times/Together Through Life accompaniment and then listen to this joyous performance, the vocalist and players alike attacking a broken-hearted cowboy lament with all the urgency of a punk-rock protest anthem. Inexplicably delightful.
[8]
Luisa Lopez: Doing their very best Dylan impression out of heritage and gratitude, which isn’t half-bad. As country music goes, this one has a history and sound like the rolling hills of the South, here expressed in those repeated joyful meetings of the fiddle and drums, which makes it a perfect road trip song — “across the wide Missouri, where the cool waters flow!” — and a decent reinvention of something odd and old: I can’t imagine this nasal, calibrated celebration anywhere but now. There’s a lot of goodness in the act of making grief triumphant, in painting a portrait where falling out of love looks like the passage through the Midwest and salvation has the shape of Texas, though it generally requires more complexity than is allowed to shine here. Which is a shame, because here has the makings of something great.
[7]
Edward Okulicz: Not being American, when I first heard the word amarillo many years ago, I thought it must be an alcoholic beverage, probably confusing it with amaretto, and that false association recurs in my mind, and it feels natural with an adjective like “sweet” preceding it and a tune that’s a lovelorn bar-room singalong of high quality. I especially love the clever rhyming scheme of the verses, which have some interesting poetic juxtapositions (“they turned back the covers/and danced the redova/’til the light of the dark” is particularly great here). The verses may do little more than recycle lovely place names and dog-eared tropes, but they set up a winning transition into the chorus — that ascending “paaa-aaa-aaage” is a hook and a half.
[8]
Thomas Inskeep: OCMS would be annoying from their name on down if this song didn’t, frankly, deliver the goods, which it does. Legend has that Bob Dylan toyed with this song for Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid but ended up not putting it on the album, and you can hear that in this version; while Dylan didn’t write it, it’s definitely of a piece with what he was doing in the early-to-mid-’70s, at least in OCMS’s version. Strummy and accordian-y in a good way, this will get you swaying. And maybe drinking.
[6]