Music Spectrum

AltCountry: Tim Lee's Concrete Dog

Thank God that Tim Lee got married. I mean, Lee’s music grabs a nice range of AltCountry—Blue Mountain, the Silos, X/John Doe, Cracker, Son Volt, and the Bottle Rockets, and that’s what you’ll hear when you first start listening to the opening, title track of Concrete Dog. However, Lee married Susan Bauer Lee, and when she comes in on verse 3 with the fuzz bass, the track finds you in one of those rocked out, bliss, oblivion, head-nodding, ear-to-ear grinning moments.

Along with Don Coffey, Jr., on drums and Greg Horne on guitars, the Lees make the kind of country rock that makes it OK to twang. “Alone Together” has the Silos’ indie-rock immediacy while fully jamming and banging along like a Smithereens tune from Nashville. Meanwhile, they also can slow it down a bit for the Meat Puppets’-sounding “Ever Before.”

I also like some of the metaphorical connections to the faith that could be fleshed out here. For instance, the chorus of “Half-life” says, “We could take all night/Try to make things right/But the half-life of this/Is forever.” An incredible idea is that with God, a half-life is still eternal, meaning that His love for us and the new life He gives us in Jesus will not be a carbon-based kind of thing.

© 2006 Benjamin C. Squires