Posted By Ben W. on December 1, 2009

Cedric Rose is a really good drummer and an even better writer. He was nice enough to offer us his review of founding member of the Greenhornes Brian Olive’s self-titled album. And here it is:

I’m going to bury Brian Olive’s self-titled summer 2009 release in a time capsule in my backyard, because I think residents of the future deserve to hear a record that offers a thorough summation of all that is good about rock music up to this point in history (AD 2009).

Olive takes an old-school aesthetic to quarter-inch tape. And by old school, I mean more Roll than Rock — strains of Memphis, Manchester and Muscle Shoals molded in the hands of a garage-rock veteran.

Olive’s all-analog M.O. perfectly suits his psychedelic arrangements, and the instrumentation builds on the bedrock of fellow former Greenhorne Jared McKinney’s beats and subsequent layers of heavy keys and bass.  Olive exhibits his multi-instrumentalist proclivities (horns, flute, xyplophone, etc.) and mixes the sounds with distorted and heavily modulated guitar courtesy of Mike Weinel (Heartless Bastards, The High and Low).Add the Kadish sisters (The High and Low) and Donna Jay Rubin (Snake Punching Contest, Fists of Love) on backup vocals and you’ve got Siren songs capable of distracting even the most resolute sailor, and making some hack reviewer to do something as stupid as put a mythological reference into a record review.

If you like ’60s soul or rock, anything Mod, New Orleans jazz, you should buy this record.

An additional two qualities set it apart:

First, it’s sentient — it’s aware of itself and its place in the universe.  You can’t pull off Olive’s kind of eclectic scope without having steeped yourself in enough of the history of popular music of the second half of the 20th century to have earned a self-awareness of your context which, paradoxically, allows you to draw from those sources to create something original. This is important at a time when the collective output of derivative nonsense by artists laboring under the misapprehension that they just invented cheese fondue threatens to drown out worthwhile work.

Second, you can judge a record on the proof of its distillation, and this album passes those tests.  Are the songs well-written, well-executed?  Check.  Does the album recreate in its resonance a place, a time, a feeling and, one way or another, pump that feeling back into listeners’ arteries with pleasantly intoxicating results?  Check.

Check out the dark, autumnal “Killing Stone,” “Echoing Light” or dream state “There Is Love.”  And if those do it for you, definitely check out “High Low” and “See Me Mariona.”

And so, citizens of the future, I submit for your consideration this circular green slab of polyvinyl chloride, etched with the hypnotic, heavy, soulful sounds of Brian Olive and his supporting cast of musicians.

– Cedric Rose

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Categories: Cincinnati music, Reviews
Tags: Brian Olive, The Greenhornes