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Neil Young once said, “I’d rather head for the ditch than stay in the middle of the road.” Jason Simon seems to have taken those words to heart. Both his work with Dead Meadow and now on his second solo album, A Venerable Wreck, reflects a desire to avoid the beaten path. The views are more interesting along the byways, and there’s a lot less traffic to contend with.
Simon adopts an old Appalachian tuning on his banjo that transforms The Same Dream into a hypnotic exercise. Using mostly banjo, drums and bass, along with undertones of organ, the song develops at a laconic pace that underscores much of the album. Hot summer days seem to have infected the grooves. Even the guitar solo is paced to deal with the sweltering heat.

Built around an acoustic guitar pattern, everything else on See What It Takes seems to stagger as if looking for a breadth of a breeze. Snowflakes Are Dancing almost seems to be in danger of melting. Even more surprisingly, this tune dates back over twenty years to when Jason was just 19. The burned-out boogie of Red Dust brings on visions of JJ Cale, while Moments Of Peace is based on the gospel guitars of Rev. Utah Smith and Rev. Lonnie Farris, yet the sound is electrified just enough to move a few decades beyond the Reverends.
Fried around the edges, the vocal-less A Venerable Wreck tracks twin guitars battling with atmospherics that threaten to go completely out of control. Similarly, The Old Ones threatens to come undocked from its Dead-inspired moorings before re-establishing itself once the inspired yet unhinged melodica disappears.

According to Simon, “Door Won’t Shut Blues is an ode to a particularly powerful moon that held me in its sway one clear-skied desert evening. Hollow Lands is for someone very close to me for many years. I’m not sure how to put this properly into words… perhaps I could say that it seems some people are doomed from the very start and try as you might you can’t alter a course seemingly set out for them by the very stars themselves.”
Avoiding the highways tends to slow one down. You can’t drive quite as fast, but you get a better view of the countryside. For Jason Simon, that’s the point. What you see along the way makes all the difference. A Venerable Wreck is the proof of that.