The Jayhawks are not old-fashioned or backward looking. This is living music: simple, reflective, sweet. Songs like "Sioux City," about alienation in a seedy
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small-town hotel, or the jauntier "Five Cups of Coffee" meld romanticized lyrics about loneliness with piercingly affecting melodies. On dreamier, more balladic songs like "Commonplace Streets" and "Will I Be Married," lead singer and songwriter Mark Olson and crack lead guitarist Gary Louris get beautiful harmonies going. The result is music as delicate and evocative as the first whiff of wild-flowers when winter is ending.
The Jayhawks' music is free of the various trends that have swept the music scene via college radio in the past decade. There's nary a jangle or a drone to be heard, and the Jayhawks could hardly be lumped in with rockabilly or roots-rock bands. Also, the arch sophistication of new country stars like Lyle Lovett and K.D. Lang – not to mention the superpristine hick purism of Dwight Yoakam – is refreshingly absent. That's not to say the Jayhawks are the most original band to come down the pike lately. Blue Earth is a footnote in the rock & roll scheme – one well worth reading if only for its calmness and prettiness, its overwhelming charm. (RS 577)
GINA ARNOLD
The Jayhawks' 1989 second album -- following their little-heard debut,
The Jayhawks -- finds the Minnesota band discovering its Far North twang. Sometimes called the seminal work of the alt-country movement that would flourish in the early Nineties,
Blue Earth is revolutionary only in its filigreed simplicity -- a delicate stomp delivered with a sweetness so foursquare it seems almost innocent. These fifteen well-carpentered songs (the reissue includes three bonus tracks) are the sound of a bar band breaking through to the next level. Falling somewhere between experience and affectation, these wintry tales of lost love and lost hopes have a lonesome-prairie bleakness, full of long black dreams, valleys that can't be crossed and crumpled dollar bills.
WILL DANA
(From RS 922, May 15, 2003)
Weird how Uncle Tupelo's No Depression is known as the seminal alt country album when the Jayhawks' Blue Earth predated it. Mark Olson is pretty much responsible for the resurgence of interest in Gram Parsons -- just listen to "Two Angels" and try not to shiver when he sings like the late Grievous Angel.
