The critical hosannas lavished upon the album Gas Food Lodging earned
Green on Red a major-label deal, though, with appropriate irony, this
very American band found themselves contracted to the British branch of
Polygram. The label's American imprint, Mercury, picked up their option
several months after the group's big-label debut, No Free Lunch, was released
in the U.K. An EP running a bit under 24 minutes (a later reissue padded
it out to full length with a 13-minute blues workout on "Smokestack
Lightning"), No Free Lunch covers territory not dissimilar to that
on Gas Food Lodging; nomadic musicians on the road ("Keep on Moving"
and the title cut), out-of-work sad sacks ("Honest Man"), families
confronted with death and loss ("Jimmy Boy"), and the struggle
to believe in something despite it all ("Time Ain't Nothing").
The band even throws in a pretty good cover of "Funny How Time Slips
Away," and their performances are noticeably tighter and sharper
than on their previous albums (the time on the road after Gas Food Lodging
seems to have paid off), while the engineering by Steven Street and Simon
Humphries is crisper and better detailed than the sometimes muddy tone
of Gas Food Lodging. But while the band sounds game, the songs are good,
and Dan Stuart is in unusually strong voice (with the exception of "The
Ballad of Guy Fawkes," where he lapses into a curious fake Brit accent,
perhaps in tribute to his new corporate sponsors), at only seven songs
No Free Lunch seems oddly incomplete, sounding less like a self-contained
short work than an album that somehow didn't get finished. There's nothing
wrong with what's here, but it's hard not to wish the band had made more
of it at the time.
(by Mark Deming , AMG) |