“Adopted Highway” by the Dave King Trucking Company – Review

I’m not gonna lie — I made fun of these guys at the show. Initially I got the impression that they played the kind of horrifying wankistry endorsed by those genuinely evil jazz people who take pleasure in (urp) Blue Train and the like. So they had a guitarist. So fucking what. I heard one tune I enjoyed, which they told me after the show was titled “I Will Live Next to the Wrecking Yard” (laughably bad song titles are a unifying theme in the Dave King Trucking Company’s discography); it was on their Adopted Highway LP, an actual record, which they sold to me below the quoted price (twenty instead of twenty-five, for which I must give them credit) and I took it home. I put the favored song on briefly as I entered my room for the evening and it sounded even more neutered and tuneless than it had during the show. I sighed and went to bed. Maybe the record would turn into a good investment, an asset to be liquefied at an opportune time.

I listened to it again on Wednesday and I realized that the guitarist overtly appropriates the hilarious, anti-melodic histrionics of Greg Ginn, one of the least talented and most consequently overhyped slingers of a six-stringer I’ve ever come across. Listen to My War and you will understand. I was surprised, though, that a player in a “jazz” band like the Trucking Company would tolerate goofery like the feedback solo in “This Is a Non-Lecture”, and I listened some more.

As I did I noticed some other attractive elements. The album has excellent sound and was recorded to analog tape, a fact of which I was surprised they made so little hay. Normally tape devotees promote the shit out of their militant anti-digitalism. I also took especial notice of the drumming on “Ice Princess” (bitchin’) and the compositional quality of most of the other songs by Dave King himself. For jazz this is melodic stuff, bearing little resemblance to the oft-racket of the concert (which may have had something to do with the cold acoustics of the chapel where it took place). According to the record label Dave King’s goal is to meld “American roots music and the avant-garde”; if by this he means introducing tunes into jazz, I’m all for it. I encourage you all to listen to this Trucking Company album — and if they come to your town, vote with your buck and support them a little. These guys deserve it, even if they do play jazz.