Rift 12/2/06

Tuesdays Robot - Self-Titled
by Nelson Heise

At first, I thought Tuesdays Robot's self-titled album was all right, a bare bones kind of album with a Dylan-esqe quality to it. I wasn't blown away, but maybe I wasn't paying attention or just wasn't in the mood for tunes with a message. By listen number two, I was starting to hear what I didn't hear at first and after the second spin, I was quite impressed.

Sometimes I can't get into stuff that has a political overtone to it, but I think the way Tuesdays Robot presents their message, I can more easily digest it because it's not being shoved down my throat, it's more like someone just talking to you.

What works best? It's hard to say, I like the tracks with a little more instrumentation besides an acoustic guitar. There are some fun slide guitar licks in "Talkin' Global Warming" and "My Guitar is Teasing Me, Go Figure" (a particularly fun track) and a banjo rhythm track on "TRIBALISM Yodel." Also, it's not a disc solely based with political tracks; there's a lot of intimate stuff going on in tracks "Ingangow," "Christina" and "Peach Colored Stripes."

By the end of my third listen, I felt like the vibe of this album would fit in somewhere close to Dylan's mid-70s work and in my opinion, that's a very good thing. NH