and another:
From the desperately energetic opening piano of "Sweet Sophia" to the relaxed satisfaction of "Big Easy", Stephen Kellogg and the Sixers display on their third album Glassjaw Boxer the talent and will to become the musicians of their generation. On Boxer, his seventh album (including solo and Sixers work), Stephen Kellogg displays an honesty present in only the finest songwriters, one that transcends the need to be cool or even to present a unified sense of self. Kellogg's unfiltered vocals and decidedly straightforward lyrics invite comparison to common-man idols Dylan and Springsteen, and puts himself on a path to make them non-heretical. The question isn't whether Kellogg and the Sixers are good enough; it's whether our grandstanding, emotionally overdone time will accomodate him.
In "Sophia", Kellogg blends the most reverent of love-letter phrasing with the energy of a gun-the-engine runaway note, producing fantastic results. It's a song you can play for the girlfriend you have ("I can't make it stop so the love keeps on growing/And if it kills me I'll be better for knowing") and the girlfriend you want ("With a fierce disposition like the beating of a drum/You get hurt more than others but you have more fun"). It's here that Kellogg draws his most obvious Springsteen corollaries; one can't hear the piano opener without thinking "Thunder Road", and the rest of the song doesn't disappoint that high standard.
The title track is a fanfare for the common musician, he who doesn't see the vindication of his name in Rolling Stone but still suffers the indignity of unfortunate gigs and poor reviews, and comes to relish them. Kellogg and the Sixers admit they've been "passed by" and "passed up", but insist their "paper hearts got tough". The band, which tours nearly year-round and boasts a 300-plus-stop tour over the last three years, equates their seemingly ignoble status to the most glorious of stands, that of the "glassjaw boxer" who knows he won't win a title but answers the bell every round, every night. It's stances like these that make Kellogg and the Sixers an intensely likable and listenable band, and Glassjaw Boxer an album not to forget some end-of-the-year Top Arbitrary Number list time. Whence the doubt, then?
Unfortunately for Kellogg and the Sixers, there's never a feeling that this is new territory. At the time of this writing, the album has yet to be released, and still it somehow feels dated. During the golden age of alternative rock that was the late '90s, a thousand bands did a thousand albums with similar themes and sounds, and lost ground to empty theatrics and iconoclasm of the iGeneration; I'm not saying I like it, I'm just saying it happened. The Sixers may end up lost between the heyday of a genre and its eventual revival.
On their only real experiment, "Big Easy", written as a country ballad but played and sung in pure rock fashion, Kellogg and the Sixers display a willingness to shift their paradigm that may eventually contradict that sentiment. "Big Easy" is not unlike the cross-country sound that made mostly Northern acts like The Band and Bob Dylan legendary; hopefully the Pennsylvania-born Kellogg and his mostly Yankee Sixers will take note.
Critically, the greatest impression of Glassjaw Boxer is the question it raises: is it fair to qualify a work that is otherwise spectacular by the accident of its date of birth? Whatever the answer to that, the fact remains that Kellogg and the Sixers have released an impeccable album, and it should be appreciated as such.
- Maggie
Posted 4 years ago on August 1, 2007
LINK
ugh...
