Alabama 3 - 'Outlaw' (One Little Indian)
2/5
By: Thomas Hannan
It's globalisation, isn't it? We'll all be yanks soon enough, part of the United Suburbs of America. Our government's accepted it, our television schedules certainly have. Maybe it's time for music to follow suit, and sharp - after all, we have literally, well, decades of culture to catch up on. Alabama 3 have always been a little escapist, and now they've realigned their radar to face over the pond (where at first they faced east, talking in glorious pop tones about Goa and the like), they're now throwing themselves in to stateside life head first. Resigned as they are it seems to it happening to all of us eventually, it's nice to have someone to at least show us the way.
They're dealing with the US historical crime scene primarily, it seems. Of course, they provided the brilliantly moody soundtrack to the wonderful miss-one-episode-and-you've-lost-the-plot-forever mafia murder fest that is 'The Sopranos', but here we delve a little further in to the delinquent past. This is a concept record of sorts, trying to update the myth of the good old English outlaw from Robin Hood and his merry men to Bruce Reynolds and the great train robbery by taking a rather extreme amount of inspiration from the more celebrated, sexy, Hollywood friendly tales of cowboys and injuns we all took as the basis of childhood role plays as we ran around schoolyards re-enacting the ethnic cleansing of nigh on an entire nation of indigenous people. Oops...
But that was only a bit of fun, wasn't it? Of course - and similarly, so is much of 'Outlaw'. The best parts certainly fit this category, the beefed up, slide guitar sleaze of 'Keep Your Shades On', the closely researched, faithfully retold celebration of mastermind criminality that is 'Have You Seen Bruce Richard Reynolds?' and the way a thoroughly silly 'Last Train To Mashville' (sic) at least makes you feel like boarding a train to anywhere just so as you can enjoy being on a train (which you imagine is precisely the point).
But why it has to be so thickly clad in cumbersome, squelching bleeps and beats where it so often proclaims to want to be a country record isn't entirely clear. It's stuck between wanting to poke light fun at the romantic criminal tradition it takes as its inspiration and glorifying it, between being a techno or a country record, between looking to America's wild west or London's west end for its musical inspiration. The worryingly uninspired 'Hello... I'm Johnny Cash', a song made up of placing Cash song titles in an order so that they tell some loose kind of story (pray it isn't how the great man is remembered) and the closing 'Gospel Train' unintentionally manage to make mockeries of two whole genres of music they're meant to be lauding, just by treating them with such little respect.
Alright, it's not the downfall of multiculturalism, just a symptom, a sneeze. We all enjoy a good sneeze, but twelve times (or tracks) in a row and you start to worry that you might never stop. Ultimately, 'Outlaw' is people getting carried away pretending to be something they're not. If all western culture is indeed states-ward bound eventually, people should at least put up a fight. Either that, or let's take proper inspiration from the outlaws of folklore and have some taste with our pillaging. Nick the best bits, mutate them in to something glorious, show people where they're going wrong. It needn't be a novelty; it's not necessarily going to involve having to ape anyone else. It needn't be about giving up.
Artists in this article: Alabama 3
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