An Album You Should Hear
The Silos — The Silos — 1990
Music
The Silos — The Silos — 1990
The Silos
The Silos
1990
This album is also known as “the one with the bird on the cover”…for apparent reasons.
But before the genre had a name, be it No Depression or Alt-Country, or whatever you want to call it, there were The Silos.
The band, built around Walter Salas-Humara and Bob Rupe, released their first album in 1986.
That album, About Her Steps, was released when No Depression/Alt-Country godfathers Jeff Tweedy and Jay Farrar were still in high school playing covers as The Primitives.
The Silos’ second album, Cuba, was released in 1987. Cuba led the band to be voted Rolling Stone’s Best New Artist of that year (there was a time when that meant something.) And in natural rock and roll trajectory, major labels came a-knockin.
The band signed with RCA Records. Which, to me, was never really a rock and roll label.
In 1990, The Silos delivered The Silos, their major label self-titled debut (The One with The Bird on The Cover), produced by Salas-Humara, Rupe, and Peter Moore.
The album has all the necessary ingredients:
Guitars? Check.
Bass? Check.
Drums? Check.
Yearning? Check.
Love? Check.
Heartbreak? Check.
Cars AND beer? Obviously!
The album contains two songs that cover both sides of the same coin that can accompany a relationship. On one side of the love spectrum, you have “I’m Over You” — the ultimate middle finger to an ex-lover. And then, on the other, you have the exuberant and adoring “Here’s to You,” which appropriately closes out the album with the perfect amount of optimism.
The Silos work on a large musical canvas — from foot-stomping & barn burning “Anyway You Choose Me” to the plaintive & pleading “(We’ll Go) Out of Town” to the poignant & wedding-ready “The Only Story I Tell.”
The seeming simplicity of the bands, specifically Sala-Humara’s, lyrics is so unpretentious that they belie their emotional complexity.
Lyrics so strong that acclaimed writer Jonathan Lethem called Walter Salas-Humara “. . . a melodic genius, one of our greatest songwriters.”
The Silos’ debut is deftly produced so that it strips away any artifice to create a bare-bones yet textured sound that perfectly serves the lyrics, music, and band.
My mother was a long-time country music fan (old school), and when she heard me playing this one day, she genuinely asked, “When did you start listening to country music?”
But don’t be fooled into thinking this is a country record; it’s just that in 1990 there was no name for what The Silos were doing.
Unfortunately, though well reviewed and with an appearance on the then uber influential Late Night with David Letterman (then at his peak on NBC), the album struggled to find an audience (see the previous comment about RCA Records.)
I suspect that the album was too rock for country and too country for rock. And by then, college radio was much too self-important. Ultimately, my guess is that RCA was just ill-equipped to market the record properly.
It’s a bit disappointing to me that the album doesn’t get the respect it so rightly deserves. Before Uncle Tupelo, before Wilco, before The Old 97’s, Whiskeytown, et al., there were The Silos.
The Silos debut album was the rarest of rare albums — both of its time AND ahead of its time.
Accordingly, it sounds just as good today as it did 30+ years ago …and as good as it will sound in another 30+ years.