Thursday, July 31, 2008

Rhett Miller writes tunes that just about anybody can play, but not everybody can write. The hunky Texan led his trusty Old 97's through two hours of bar-rock bliss at a sold-out 9:30 club Tuesday.

The quartet (Miller, bass player Murry Hammond, drummer Philip Peeples and guitarist Ken Bethea) has been intact for a decade and a half, yet everybody onstage still has fun -- and looks fab while having it. During "Lonely Holiday," one of the band's many three-chord pleas for companionship, Miller turned his Levi-encased backside to the audience and just kept shaking it. The dance was more spazzy than Chippendales-y, but it conveyed joy.

Miller's woe-is-me-isms aren't wholly convincing. He occasionally comes off as an untormented, functional Gram Parsons -- another Southern heartthrob from an all-boy prep school who chose countrified music as a means to rock-and-roll. "The Other Shoe," a song about a guy who premeditatedly murders his unfaithful wife, and "I Will Remain" both sounded like the Replacements during that band's ironic, tuning-optional ventures into twang. "Big Brown Eyes" and "If My Heart Was a Car" recalled the Pogues.

There were no obvious degrees of separation between the Old 97's' original material and the cover of Jon Langford's Brit-country "Over the Cliff." Hammond's sweet "Color of a Lonely Heart Is Blue," full of high harmonies, could have come from Ryan Adams.

A lot of guitar-based roots bands, in other words, have gone for exactly what the Old 97's go for. But few have matched Miller, et al's consistency or durability. If you loved one song from this set list, you probably loved all of 'em.

-- Dave McKenna