Drunk / To Corner Wounds by Todd Pontius Jagjaguwar For a city its size, Richmond's cultural community seems incredibly small and isolated. Maybe that explains why Drunk's new record To Corner Wounds sounds so different from most rock bands. I've got a theory that isolation leads to a kind of musical iconoclasm, the antidote to the sound-alike crap that comes out of Chapel Hill and D.C. Richmond has a long tradition of this, from Honor Role to the Orthotonics to Labradford. But what makes To Corner Wounds such an evocative record? First of all, to call Drunk a rock band is misleading. Except for a quick tease at the end, To Corner Wounds refuses to rock. This, of course, isn't a bad thing. Rock isn't dead, it's just been broken into little pieces and absorbed by other genres. But genres suck anyway -- they never work; you always have to ask the clerk to find the record for you. In this day and age you've got to admire a band actually playing instruments,let alone trying to make interesting music with them. This doesn't make Drunk any more "authentic" than say, My Bloody Valentine, but it does make their sound stand out. Guitarist Rick Alverson writes scaled-down songs, which he sings in a small, almost fragile voice. With some friends playing decidedly non-rock instruments in the background (accordion, pennywhistle, and violin), the music sounds orchestrated, almost lush, instead of stripped down. A pretty interesting feat, considering the simple structures that underlie most of the songs. There's not a single chorus on the record; most songs consist of just a verse or two, slowly unrolling. Nobody writes songs like this, except maybe the Minutemen, and they broke up a long time ago. But unlike the Minutemen, these songs move slowly. If fast beats sound mechanical, slow beats sound almost organic. Like the glacial sound of slowcore advocates, this record makes you think of winter,when the days are shorter and life moves more slowly than usual. To Corner Wounds tells stories about strange and simple things, not the usual "I'm-on-fire-for-your-burning-love-baby" stuff most rock and roll is made of. When songs come at you like this, they open themselves up to a kind of hypersensitive examination. "The Bark of My Body" tells a tale of a guy taking a bath and then sneaking peaks at the Kama Sutra when in bed with his lover. The protagonist of "Andrei Rublev," on the other hand, dresses up like the eponymous Russian director only to be told he "looks just like St. Francis in drag." Bummer, huh? Maybe "sentimental" is the best word to describe this kind of storytelling. The music on To Corner Wounds, like that of Will Oldham, the Mountain Goats, or the Supreme Dicks, usually touches people on a very personal level. It's a pretty interesting approach: rather than blasting you into oblivion, Drunk invites you to reach out to them. I like this record, and its a noticeable improvement on their previous album, A Derby Spiritual. It takes a lot to keep a song going, though sometimes this record's down-tempo movement seems to stagnate. Also, Alverson at times mimics both Michael Stipe's voice and his incredible earnestness. But give Drunk a try. It doesn't rock in any sense of the term, but you could snuggle up to To Corner Wounds on a cold day, drink some tea, and look out the window, waiting for Spring to come. Todd Pontius, on his honor as a student of the University of Virginia has neither given nor received aid on this assignment/review. Drunk will be having a CD-release party at Tokyo Rose on Friday, March 27th.

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