Backyard Tire Fire, who emerge from a fertile Midwest music scene that's introduced America to some of its greatest new rock bands over the last decade, fully embrace the best characteristics of their generation's genre-bending, influence-melding approach to creating music. Incorporating rock'n'roll, folk, pop, alt-country, Southern rock, and R&B influences, however, only serve as means to a greater end for Ed Anderson, the sublime songwriter who's the voice and vision behind BTF. On the band's third album, Vagabonds & Hooligans, Anderson goes deep into his own psyche to conjure and craft his most intriguing lyrics and gorgeous melodies yet. Strip away all the tweaked atmospherics, haunting harmonies and majestic recording techniques found in songs like "The Wrong Hand," "A Long Time," "Don't Know What To Do" and the album's title cut and what remains at the core are songs utterly singular and consistently transcendent.
Further illuminating the dizzying reach of this three piece band's abilities is its live show. On stage, BTF sheds some of their more subtle and introverted studio dynamics to create a sound that can rival the best power rock trios in music today. The classic slide guitar tones Anderson coxes from his guitar, combined with the muscular rhythm section of brother Matt Anderson on bass and Tim Kramp on drums, delivers on the glory that rock music once promised in its heyday.
Via extensive touring (from clubs to festivals), BTF has built reputation as a compelling, remarkably flexible live act, sharing stages with such diverse luminaries as Son Volt, Clutch, Alejandro Escovedo, Mellisa Ferrick, James McMurtry, The Mother Hips, William Elliot Whitmore , North Mississippi Allstars, Will Hoge, and Dan Bern—and gathering a hard-won fan-base along the way.
Like its predecessor, the brand-new Vagabonds and Hooligans is co-produced by BTF and Tony SanFilippo with organic, old-school immediacy, utilizing the vintage early-’70s 3M tape machine (a la the Rolling Stones’ Exile on Main Street) and gear housed at SanFilippo’s proudly-analog Oxide Lounge Recording studio in Bloomington.
Although outwardly similar in tone and texture to Bar Room Semantics, Vagabonds and Hooligans is palpably more assured, accomplished and cohesive, the tracking order of the far-ranging tunes more expertly positioned, and—as Ed readily acknowledges—“this record rocks a little more; I take a couple of solos out a little bit, something we do much more live.”
Not surprisingly, the aforementioned ‘out’-bound solos underscore Anderson’s six-string facility and range, from the soaring, lyrical fretwork on the impossibly lovely, Beatle-esque (right down to Kramp’s ‘puddin’ head’ tub-work) anthem “Corinne” to the muscular, stream-of-consciousness Southern rock rave-up of “Downtime.”
Clearly, the boy could be an all-world air-guitar poster-child, but the lyrical content herein and the band’s attendant, sublime attention to making the music ‘serve the song’ holds sway.
Whether delivered in the first or third person, Anderson’s tunes continue to eloquently address regret, disconnectedness, internal demons and the dark end of the street, in general—just witness this brain-pan-spinner from the outwardly-placid title cut:
“Vagabonds and hooligans are beating down the door of the house that burns on a hill inside my head…”
Yikes!! It’s not all heavy-lifting, though, as the spirited, tongue-in-cheek rock-star romp on “Tom Petty” underscores, but most of Anderson’s hunting takes place in the tall, tall grass, simply because that’s where the biggest beasts are…
Big-hearted, jarringly direct and riding a powerful, upward arc, Backyard Tire Fire is a happening thing. Wake up and smell the burning rubber…