Co-Balt
Cobalt, Brute's long-awaited follow-up to their 1995 album,Nine High a Pallet, took its name from the German word for an underground goblin. When cobalt was first discovered in 1735, its ores were mistaken for copper and iron. When it didn't yield the expected metals upon smelting, the failure was blamed on the work of demons or a goblin. Somehow, the name seems particularly apt for this second pairing of jam-band extraordinaireWidespread Panicand rock's most talented iconoclastic minstrel,Vic Chesnutt. Like the discovery of cobalt, what you see--or think you see--is not what you get. Chesnutt's ragged, winsome poetry somehow works supremely well with Panic's unstructured, loose-limbed, jazzy style, creating something that is neither fish nor fowl and unlike anything they could do independently. Maybe it is the work of demons, those feral demons that lurk in Chesnutt's rich psyche, but whatever the impetus was, the alchemy the two create by coming together has allowed each to rein in their excesses and truly make a whole that is greater than the parts. Chesnutt's trademark stream-of-consciousness tone poems seem to take on a greater coherence and shape when he's fronting Brute, and Panic don't head off for the outer planets, in some interstellar jam, but actually have a defined rhythm while performing the Chesnutt-penned tunes. Recorded in only three days in producer John Keane's home studio, there is a poignant raw power to the 11 songs, and a freshness and crackling vitality not witnessed in a proper Widespread Panic album. Many of the songs were just ideas pulled out of Chesnutt's files, sung spontaneously over the already recorded tracks, but there are few serrated edges and off-kilter moments. Instead, Panic's surprisingly straight-ahead rock performance--sounding at times likeZZ Top--and Chesnutt's haunting, idiosyncratic imagery flow as smoothly as the Oconee River that runs through Athens, Georgia, which Panic and Chesnutt both call home.--Jaan Uhelszki