Repotted Palms

Hinterlander goes Hawaiian

Comments (0) By Trinie Dalton Wednesday, Mar 6 2002

Eureka ironized its own accessibility by piling on the “bad” pop details (sub-Sanborn sax, a hyperarranged Bacharach cover). Insignificance, an all-analog affair with fewer musicians, is less guarded and more consistently enjoyable. Most of the disc finds the core band (including Dazzling Killmen bassist Darin Gray and hometown hornmen Rob Mazurek and Ken Vandermark) building five-to-seven-minute suites on O’Rourke’s solid acoustic foundation. But partly thanks to Jeff Tweedy and Glenn Kotche, guitarist/front man and drummer of Wilco (no mean genre-twisters themselves), two tracks rock in earnest. On “Therefore, I Am,” barre-chord blasts the Strokes should envy give way to a soaring falsetto chorus, while the Tweedy riff that opens “All Downhill From Here” (and the album) is convincingly Skynyrd-fried, masking the song’s jarring five-bar phrases.

The fly in the ointment is the lyric content, which plumbs depths of misanthropy that make labelmate Bill Callahan (Smog) sound like Bobby McFerrin. O’Rourke couples his strongest hooks with his most caustic observations, as on the standout “Memory Lame”: “Listening to you reminds me/of how the deaf are so damn lucky.” On “Get a Room,” it’s hard to say which is grimmer: the scenario of a luckless fellow with one night to live spending his last moments beside a dozing one-night stand (“Maybe you should kick her”), or the arrangement’s soft-rock bounce, with its marked resemblance to (no joke) Edie Brickell’s dreaded “What I Am.” (Franklin Bruno)