
Earnest, plainspoken and single-minded, Jay Farrar has amassed a sizeable and distinctive body of work since coming on the radar with Uncle Tupelo in 1987. THE SEARCH, the fifth album by the St. Louis-based artist under the Son Volt nameplate, takes Farrar's signature juxtapositions of the arcane and the modern to provocative extremes, contrasting the blue highways of a disappearing cultural landscape with a perilous world in which the center no longer holds - a world of information overload, of clueless leaders carrying out sinister agendas, of "Hurricanes in December - earthquakes in the heartland / Bad air index on a flashing warning sign" as the artist sings ruefully on "The Picture".
1) Slow Hearse
2) The Picture
3) Action
4) Underground Dream
5) Circadian Rhythm
6) Beacon Soul
7) The Search
8) Adrenaline and Heresy
9) Satellite
10) Automatic Society
11) Methamphetamine
12) L Train
13) Highways and Cigarettes
14) Phosphate Skin