Tracker - Ames

  by John Clarkson

published: 17 / 12 / 2001

Label: Filmguerrero
Format: CD

intro

"Desert rock" at its very best, Tracker's epic-sounding and evocative debut album 'Ames' draws comparisions with and has a similar haunting quality to Ry Cooder's 'Paris, Texas' and Calexico's 'Hot Ra

"Desert rock" at its very best, Tracker's epic-sounding and evocative debut album 'Ames' draws comparisions with and has a similar haunting quality to Ry Cooder's 'Paris, Texas' and Calexico's 'Hot Rail.' It was recorded by sound engineer John Askew principally as a solo project at nights and during off-peak periods at the Type Foundry Recording studio, the analog studio in which he works in Portland in Oregon, and takes its name from a small city in Iowa, which Askew found on a map but has never visited. A loosely-formed lo-fi concept album, 'Ames' is "the soundtrack" to a film that has never been made and follows "the travels of one man alone as he drives." The whole album slow burns with a beautiful and stark restlessness. Songs start up, seem about to finish and then take off again, often in a different key. The sound of radio static ; of vehicles starting up and in motion, and ghostly foreign voices open and close tunes. Askew plays most of the instruments, on the album, including mandolin, accordion and some of the drums.himself, but his unhurried, soft-grinding, and occasionally distorted guitar is its main instrument. His vocals meanwhile paint a powerful, barren picture of impressive, but desolate landscapes, empty roads and motels in which no one stays The mournful 'Waiting for Food' begins acoustically, and with electric instruments gradually being layered and slotted in, meanderingly builds to a grandiloquent end. It finds its protagonist abandoning his wife and escaping out West, but never really knowing what he is running away from. The poetic and enigmatic 'We Don't Need to Speak' features Adam Selzer, who fronts Norfolk and Western, Tracker's band mates on Askew's own record label Film Guerrero, on piano, and describes a couple in their "last minutes together" who alone in the beauty of the desert wake up after weeks asleep and serenely seem to watch their relationship drift to a close. ' 'Liquored (in the baker)', about seemingly a lack of communciation, meanwhile has a free flowing jazz instrumental thrown into its middle, and then is brought to an abrupt close with the sound of a single acoustic guitar. Experimental, imaginative and provocative, 'Ames' is alternative rock at its most pure and visual.

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