FIELDS OF SOUND :: The Coming Grass release Transient

Sam Pfeifle · The Portland Phoenix · December 5-12, 2002

The Coming Grass are awash in talent. In the three years since their self-titled debut, the husband-and-wife team of Nate Schrock and Sara Cox has served as anchor while musicians have swirled about them. They have seen Ginger Cote move to Nashville only y´o fill her role with Uncle Tupelo/Wilco drummer Ken Coomer. They have borrowed Boneheads Steve Jones and Scott Elliot and made Jones’s presence permanent on guitar, picking up work from Backsliders bassist Roger Gupton along the way. Now they find themselves with Cote returned (bringing along yet another bassist in Justin Maxwell) and functioning as a five-piece on solid footing.

Only the talent displayed by these fine musicians, combined with Schrock and Cox’s equal skill and songwriting, could have kept Transient, the Coming Grass’s long-awaited follow-up album from falling apart under the weight of its history. It has been recorded in fits and starts and pieces, mixed and remixed, layered and stripped, written and reimagined constantly, and, yet, the final product feels nearly as cohesive and constant as the Beatles’ Please Please Me, famous for having been banged out in a single day-long session.

They have also fought the possibility that Transient will be undone by the impression that the album has been leaked out to the public like information given out to the White House press corps. Yes, six of the 14 songs have appeared on either the Area Code 207 compilations or Cox’s Firewater EP, but those should have been labeled “in progress,” as what you’ll find here on the final release have been remixed and melded into songs that deserve to be presented together, as part of a greater product.

“4th Child,” for instance, was an effective soul-searcher when Cox recorded it solo, but, here, its spare intro, with just Cox’s vocals and a whisper of acoustic guitar, is soon joined by organs and percussion, then electric guitars, continually building, but never reaching the level of Cox’s vocals in the mix.

Her voice a little bit more husky, lower in the register than the solo version, but the listener is still touched by the life “cut down quickly and left to die on the kitchen floor.” And the layers keep building. In the chorus, Cox’s vocals are doubled. Late in the song, Paul Chamberlain enters with appropriately delicate piano, a high-pitched counterpoint to Cox’s heavy vocals and lyrics, which even threaten to get aggressive as the song enters its final stages.

With the care and effort that has been invested in constructing the song, it’s easy to picture long hours of Schrock, at home, under dim lights, eyes bloodshot, laboring over increasingly sophisticated mixing equipment. That sort of obsession has the potential to kill a song, but the band have made wise choices.

Another Cox favorite, “Waste of Time,” has been given a dose of sunshine with mando trills from Jones, leaving the dire vocals to impart more of a resignation than a desperation. And Schrock’s slide guitar now sounds so fucking good it just doesn’t seem fair. How does he get that tone?

“Vacancy Sign,” first heard way back on Area Code Vol. 1, now has percussion from both Cote and Coomer (as does “The Rain Is Gone”), and is probably the best song on Transient&Mac249; Schrock’s vocals have never been better or more witty: “Redecorate my room with nightmare paint/ But I can still read the writing on the wall.” Punctuated by Cox’s backup vocals, built upon Gupton’s simple bass, and fired up with a Jones guitar solo, the song is exactly what’s great about this band: They may have mellowed a bit since their debut (the newest of the songs here is the delicate “This Road”), but their offerings continue to draw on Schrock’s punk background and the sound that led one reviewer to ask when Sun Volt and the Rolling Stones broke up and decided to form the Coming Grass.

You thought they were a standard alt-country outfit? Hardly. “Product Pushing,” a song of sarcasm and “hooray for me” deprecation, with its staccato guitar fed by distortion has more in common with 6gig than Wilco. The finish, with weird off-key recorder from Jones and a guitar trill, fades into nothingness and then comes back with a White Album vengeance.

“Guard Down” is downright nasty, with a dark disco guitar intro and Steely Dan swagger. And “The Rain Is Gone” just goes and goes and goes, clocking in at over six minutes with an extended jam that would do the Dead proud, Coomer riding his splash cymbal for all it’s worth, Schrock and Jones noodling away.

At 14 songs, the album has plenty of weight to it, and though they sound suspiciously like Boneheads songs, the two numbers penned by Jones — “Fix Me up Doctor” and “Fix Your Own Cup of Tea” — aren’t so full of wordplay as to devolve into camp. There’s nice rhythm to the track order, too, the downbeat tone broken up when necessary so that dirge doesn’t dominate.

If it’s not a masterpiece, it’s only because it leaves an ardent fan wanting more. I’m already looking forward to their next album.