While the
String Cheese Incident has become known for its on-stage jamming, as captured on its three regular live albums (
A String Cheese Incident Live,
Carnival '99, and
It's About Time), and its dozens of discount-priced, limited-edition concert transcriptions issued through the On the Road series, for its studio albums the band has tended to turn to outside producers, looking for a decisive voice to push them in new directions. Hence,
Steve Berlin on
Outside Inside and
Youth on
Untying the Not both presented different visions of what the
String Cheese Incident could sound like, and
Malcolm Burn (whose previous clients include
Bob Dylan,
Emmylou Harris, and
the Neville Brothers) presents yet another on
One Step Closer. One might as easily say, however, that the group chooses a producer to help it facilitate a current sense of itself and its material, and
Burn's function here seems to have been similar to what
John Simon attempted with
the Band on
Music From Big Pink. Indeed, the group borrowed a house in the Rockies near its Boulder, CO, base and recorded there, just as
the Band did in Woodstock, NY, back in the '60s. And, as with
the Band, the point seems to have been to create a repertoire of material. This is not an album of jamming -- no song runs longer than five-minutes-and-twenty-seconds -- or solos, though there are moments when you can hear the group chomping at the bit to take off, usually just near the end of a track. This is an album of songs, and those songs have been carefully doled out among the five bandmembers, who get two or three writing credits each. Of course, some writers are better than others, especially as lyricists, and so there are some other names on the credits to beef up the words. Nashville songwriter
Jim Lauderdale contributes to
Billy Nershi's "Big Compromise" (a song that seems to be about band interactions) and
Keith Moseley's "Brand New Start";
John Perry Barlow, best known for his work with
the Grateful Dead's
Bob Weir, is part of
Michael Kang's "Give Me the Love" and the group-composed "Drive"; and
the Dead's other main lyricist,
Robert Hunter, brings in a typically elliptical set of words for
Kyle Hollingsworth's "45th of November." The result is a strong body of compositions that range from heartfelt love songs to fairly esoteric reflections, usually performed as cohesive shuffles in a jam band groove. No doubt they will be explored and extended further in concert (indeed, some already have been), but it's nice to have these compact studio versions as a jumping-off point. (The package also includes a DVD containing a half-hour "making of" documentary featuring interviews and studio footage.)