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Reviews of The Arizona Record
review by Josh Gennet, Nadine Magazine, FEB 94
On what do we base our categories? One man's Deicide is another man's Indigo Girls, I guess. Some recent discussion of the Silver Jews' The Arizona
Record has made it painfully clear that there is some disagreement on what makes for good "pop-rock." No surprise. The fact that Spin just called Drag City
America's best record label didn't have much effect on how my friends regard this album -- some didn't believe I'd spent money on such crap, and some didn't
believe I'd scored such a find at Cutler's.
So what do the Silver Jews sound like? An analogy: if Pavement spent the night sitting around drinking 40-ouncers and listening to VU albums, then decided
to go jam and record it on a boom box with a normal-bias tape from Radio Shack that someone had lying around, hitting pause between songs, then took that tape
to have it mastered for CD, it would probably sound a lot like The Arizona Record. If this sounds like a good thing to you, I guess it is. Truth be told, I like this a lot
and think the songs are amazing. Truth be told, it is far and away the worst recording I have ever heard. Ever. And of course it's on CD, winning the Biggest Waste
of Digital Audio Technology award hands down.
For some strange reason, the last song on the Silver Jews album, "The Bar Scene from Star Wars," sounds disturbingly Cocteau.
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