Amoeba Music

Greenland is Cracker's strongest offering since its early '90s high point, Kerosene Hat, and you suspect that the similar cover art – vintage postcards reminiscent of estate sales and thrift-store bins – was no coincidence. The record reads nostalgic, too, almost like a journey through songwriter David Lowery’s past (both in Cracker and its progenitor, Camper Van Beethoven). "Something You Ain't Got" opens with organ swells, barroom piano and high plains lap steel, a reminder that Lowery has always excelled at these elegiac country rockers. The propulsive road song "Where Have Those Days Gone" courses through Lowery's Northern California past, reaching the same resigned-but-redeemed destination as the cheekier "I Need Better Friends." The record turns exotic with the country-weeper-done-with-tabla-and-sitar lament "I'm So Glad She Ain't Never Coming Back," but it’s the trance-inducing “Sidi Ifni,” with its thick organ swirls, acres of reverb guitar, and hallucinatory bridge-crescendo, that anchors the record. The six-minute epic about the former ex-pat stronghold in southern Morocco that has succumbed, like the song’s narrator, to time's ravages, finds Lowery wandering the crumbling seaside town’s empty alleys, deserted souks, and abandoned consulates, images of "lethargy, decay, and forgotten loves" pulling the hypnotized listener down – blissfully – with him. The closing stanza recalls Lowery's best writing on Camper Van Beethoven’s swan song, Key Lime Pie: "I drink gin with the old expats/We are broken things/From a broken past/And it comes near/But just out of grasp/The alchemist words/That would bring her back.” Contrasting nicely with “Sidi Ifni” and the bluesier (but similarly heavy) “Minotaur” are the record's gentle laments, "Fluffy Lucy" and "Night Falls," which sound like Sparklehorse outtakes – not surprising since frequent collaborator Mark Linkous plays on and co-produces both. Even Greenland’s rockers, usually Cracker’s Achilles’ heel, benefit from dynamic accents and studio alchemy. A keening Casio brightens “Riverside,” and the menacing “Gimme One More Chance” includes a memorable Johnny Hickman solo. By the time the wistful country pop of “Darling We’re Out of Time” winds down, Greenland has proven well worth the journey.