It’s been more than two decades since Cracker’s commercial apex, back when “Low” dominated MTV and the Internet was an oddity. Yet the band’s core duo, frontman David Lowery and ace guitarist Johnny Hickman, is still cranking out workman-like tunes, releasing its first new studio album in five years, a double-disc called Berkeley to Bakersfield.
The title is as telling as it might seem — the “Berkeley” disc is full of pointedly political songs fueled by the duo’s more rockin’ tendencies, while “Bakersfield” leans more heavily on countrified excursions.
“Ultimately, those two stylistic themes in those two albums are what are essentially in our first album (1991’s Cracker),” Lowery recently told diffuser.fm when asked about the two-disc approach. “To me, this is a good summary of what the band does. Instead of blending it together in one disc, we sort of teased it out and spread it out over two discs … And it’s actually really great having 18 songs, that way we can go all the way from the edgy stuff to the straight-up Bakersfield Honky Tonk tunes.”
The album-opening one-two, “Torches and Pitchforks” and “March of the Billionaires,” from the “Berkeley” disc, set the tone immediately, as Lowery delivers the kind of irony-free lyrics that laced much of Cracker’s early work (not to mention that of his first and still-working band Camper Van Beethoven). He takes on bought-off congressmen, mansion-dwelling billionaires, greedy lawyers, oppressive employers and generally anyone taking advantage of the 99 percent. And he does it in a way that doesn’t seem strained or preachy, delivering his invective with a smile and musical dexterity.
This article appears in Jul 29 – Aug 4, 2015.