"Jon Wahl has been plowing his own lonely, multi-instrumental, furrow for well over a decade now. It’s been a rocky road that’s seen him go from doyen of the major labels during the post Nirvana, grunge feeding-frenzy when Interscope snapped up his super-frenetic, cubist rock troubadours Clawhammer, to this, his latest incarnation as vocalist/guitarist/ keyboard and horn man with the Amadans, Gaelic, incidentally, for idiot.

Wahl himself may be cursing his own principled idiocy in financing an e.p that attacked the dumbness and spoonfed homogeneity of current US Rock, as embodied in the Bush-backing corporate radio behemoth “Clear Channel” and rock waxworks “The Rolling Stones”, then distributing it to Stone’s fans outside one of last years “low key” gigs. Hate mail and financial ruin seem to have been the rewards reaped thus far.

“Nails..”, further self- funded and produced reprises the two tracks on “Tribute to the Rolling Stones” and adds a lot more besides, coming across on first listen as a hybrid of Borbetomagus and Eugene Chadbourne with cover versions of The Residents and Franz List thrown in, and on subsequent listens as a rather brilliant and sneaky series of rock and country-waltz standards spiked with all kinds of rhythmic and jazz fuelled subversions. “Nails” scratchy, low-fi production flattens out and saps the dynamics on some of the tracks, and it often feels that Wahl is quite consciously avoiding either the rock blast of Clawhammer or the lusher, more expansive Alt-alt country grandeur of the Amadans magnificent first effort, the overlooked “Sour Suite”

“Nails” is more dense than his last work and more diverse. A series of mini-dramas within a larger whole it alludesn to “Moby Dick”, beginning with a cry of “Call me Ishmael,” and ending with a drunken Wahl clinging to a coffin. Along the way we’re treated to the Zoot-suit and rattlesnake-feedback shuffle of the Congo-groovy “The day it rained pigeon shit”, attacks on Korporate rock and Wahl’s nostalgia for it’s co-opted promise,“I don’t believe in the Pop world” “Would somebody please pull the plug” “Threnody for St Cecelia”, and a full-tilt romp through “Leibestraum” that collapses into demented howling.

Wahl’s attack on corporate rock is no easy run through rebel-cliches, and “Nails” is as uncompromising aesthetically as Wahl’s stand has been politically. The truth of this album, a truth missing from the tritely confessional “boy looses girl” re-treads of his Alt-Country peers is that so much of his daily life is inevitably bound up in the misery and frustration of being an intelligent, talented rock musician within Corporate America. The picture Wahl paints is richer, truer, dares to engage with the political dimension of life and is consequently fuller. Bitterness, despair, bruised romanticism and righteous ire are counterbalanced by skewed musical tangents, irreverent pastiche, determined aggression. An exhausted and an exhausting sound, but because Wahl still understands the liberating value of play, finally not a defeated one. Wahl’s dedication to “all Future revolutionaries” suggests that, for him at least, it may simply be yet another new beginning."

--Carl Neville