Sold Date: December 16, 2024
Start Date: November 16, 2024
Final Price: $51.99 (USD)
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Sometimes a joke starts small and develops a life of its own, and to a certain degree that seems to be the case with . In 1984,  staged a solo acoustic tour of the United States, and  was tapped to open the shows.  and  became fast friends, and they soon began playing their encores together, harmonizing on vintage country tunes and dubbing themselves . In 1985, they cut a  single, and took to spinning an elaborate backstory for the characters of siblings  () and  (), who boldly claimed to have written a remarkable number of classic country and blues classics traditionally credited to others. Forty years after ' debut,  and  have taken the act out of mothballs for a combination podcast and radio play, scripted by  and directed by , and  is the duo's "debut" album, featuring 20 songs written for the podcast series (though "The People's Limousine," from the 1985 single, wasn't included). While  and  get co-star billing here, and 's touch is frequently audible, this plays more like an eccentric  project with production and occasional interjections from  than the fully collaborative effort one might have expected. The doomstruck spoken passages in "The Devil's Wife" and the mixed metaphors of baseball and global discord in "World Serious" are pure , and they feel grave and introspective in a way most of the tunes are not, with many clearly playing for laughs. "My Baby Just Whistles (Here Come the Missiles)" plays like a distant cousin of "Please Mr. Kennedy," the faux-novelty song  helped create for the  soundtrack; "Yesteryear Is Near" is a venomous parody of "patriotic" British Music Hall numbers that would be ideal for Archie Rice; and "Early Shirley" is a playful early rock & roll knockoff that sounds like it took only slightly longer to write than to play, and is all the more enjoyable for it. These songs were supposedly written by  over the space of many years, which accounts for the frequent stylistic shifts in the performances and production, but it's hard to imagine how the raucous aural chaos of "Birkenhead Girl" and the sweet, old-timey "Smoke Ring Angle" are intended to be part of the same narrative, let alone the same fictive repertoire. That said, there's a playfulness and spontaneity in this music that sets  apart from the increasingly mannered and ambitious approach of 's work from 2018's  onward (and of 's  series). It doesn't quite sound like a collaboration from two of the finest songwriters of their day, but maybe that's the point -- this is  and  having a good time throwing ideas at the wall, and a fortunate number of them happen to stick. ~ Mark Deming