Search - Nels Cline :: Sad

I didnt know they carried this

Pharoah S. Wail | Inner Space | 05/26/2007

(3 out of 5 stars)

"I guess I usually look up specific Nels Cline albums here, because today I didn't. Today I searched only "nels cline" and found that this and Chest are now here! I swear I went to review these in the late '90s and found they weren't carried by this site. Oh well.



This is an album by the trio of Nels, Bob Mair - electric bass, and Michael Preussner - trap drums. In the wake of Nels' new Wilco fan base, this is a little-known band but make no mistake about it... for us Nels fans 10 years ago, this band was it. This is really the band that put Nels on the map. Granted, there weren't too many of us reading that particular map at the time. Still, it seemed back then that everyone who knew Nels loved him... we just all waited and hyped him until more people knew of him.



Reviewing one of these albums all these years later is strange actually, because with everything he's released since then, it's now tough to listen (look) back to these without considering them next to everything that has come since. I've mainly found that what I loved of Sad originally (mainly the first 4 tracks) is what I still prefer. I was never a huge fan of some of the herky-jerky, proggy directional changes in this band's compositions. So across all their albums, I tend to favor the songs that have less of that. When the composition seems to melt away and Nels lets loose... whether that be in the form of soaring beauty or incrementally small, riveting musical paranoia... that is when these bands were at their best, for me.



As cool as this is, and as historically important as it is to Nels' chronology & discography, in purely musical terms, when stuff like Interstellar Space Revisited, Inkling, Destroy All, etc... began to come out, I thought that stuff really knocked this down a peg. Of course it's not all peaches and cream later on. There's nothing on The Giant Pin that comes anywhere near the power of Sad's best.



Sad is crucial to fully understanding Nels' arc but were you burning a cd of "Nels most psychologically devastating passages", all the representative tracks from Sad would come from the first 4.



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