Dave Hudson
Reverence vs. New Sickness
Rhyolite Records

I'm really tired of seeing Radiohead on everybody's top ten list for 2000. Yeah, the album was good, but Dave Hudson deserves to be heard more than those angry wankers. I say, "Fuck Radiohead, New Sickness is the best album of 2000."

But let's start with Reverence since it was released first. Reverence limps up to you with the oddly liquidly-phrased "Matter of Conscience" and tells you it's hard-luck story including, but not limited to going to bed with a bucket of fast food and waking up to belligerent prostitutes. This first cut on the album sounds like someone born in a junkyard trying to sound not so junkyardey. Kind of like a backwards Tom Waits. Maybe the median where someone like I just described would meet Tom Waits. Tom is on his way down to the scrapyard and Dave Hudson and company are on their way up to the bars, but right this second, they're both at (and on) the midway, giving each other the evil eye.

From there, we're treated to strange, spooky songs like "The Rinky Dink Man" (my three-year-old's favorite. He even made up his own version of a song with the same name. Mostly the title chanted over and over.), a backwards love song, freakshows, broken maps, and weird relationships and car trips.

This album grabbed me instantly with it's accidental, broken, perfectly clumsy opening track and kept ahold of me all the way through it's spoken word, Burroughs-esque-ish final cut. In fact, it is the album that I keep returning to every chance I get. Reverence is Dave Hudson's first album, and it's only the little brother to his second...

If these CDs are actually brothers, then Reverence is the younger, more restless brother who scraps and fights. New Sickness is the more sedate, grown up album. That doesn't mean that it managed to get the junkyard out of it's blood. Even the opening track, "Correspondence" has a tinge of the old caustic family trait in Tommy Steinberg's guitar solo. The Guitar solo sounds like something that you wouldn't want to eat. Like the knobs of an old boiler in the basement of a defunct department store down the street from where your old aunt used to live before they kicked her out.

But by the time you get to the fifth track, you could have easily forgotten that this is the same Dave Hudson and friends who came limping at you from the scrapyard to fight you with Reverence. "Samson in Duluth" reminds you. It comes up from the muck with the metal percussion weapons of Rich Douthit and Jason Schwartz and beats you around for a bit (4:29 to be exact), and while you're being pummelled, Dave is standing over you saying things like "We buried her to sleep" and "With a nose ring, cattle prod/Running through the back yard/Samson got away."

New Sickness didn't catch me as immediately as Reverence, but Holy Shit is it good! If you have to make a choice between these two albums, buy them both. There is no question that in the void of actual music last year, Dave Hudson came out on top.

Reverence - ***** ² (of a possible 5 stars)

New Sickness - **** ² (of a possible 5 stars)

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