REVIEWS

Illinois Entertainer, May 1997 review, entire text:

Local quintet The Good has changed their lineup a bit since their debut release a few years back, but songwriters Tony Rogers and Devin Arkin and guitarist John Scholvin have stuck together and are just getting better.

Rogers specializes in biographies of people you don't know at the beginning of the song but you do at the end. The heroine of "Tinky McVieux" "fibs like a schoolgirl and smokes like a gun" (get the picture?), with a guitar line found somewhere in "Strawberry Fields" and haunting backing vocals. Rogers' "Popular Notions" pleases as well, with tales of three shallow people going for the external picture over the internal one. And "Hang" has an unnerving tag line--"a man condemned to drown can't hang"-- that's somehow still catchy.

Arkin goes for preachy over people, sometimes to adverse effect. "Ten Years After" is for all you lamebrains who watched "Sanford and Son" instead of going to Bio lab in college (oh wait, that was me). "Get off your ass / Go to class" he sings, and all you feel like saying is "make me." He also lambastes Nixon, Jefferson, and Marion Barry in "Atticus"--easy targets all. He fares much better on "Shame," which is about comparing the size of his member to the guys' at the Y, and on "I Know," his version of a hymn complete with organ, kid's choir, and whistles, he says what he'd do if God asked him to kill his son like Abraham was asked to kill Isaac. Definitely leagues away from the run-of-the-mill "boy loses girl" theme that clogs up radio nowadays.

O.K., so The Good's lyrics have it all over most locals, and they could stop there, but they don't. Scholvin is a rock god guitarist who perks up this record all over the place, Arkin adds violin on Rogers' eerie "Building On Graves," and this band could give a seminar on how to turn background vocals into the most intriguing part of the song. When I reviewed their last record, I said that The Good live up to their name. This time, they outclass it.

Rating: 8 (out of 10)