New Dawn - There's A New Dawn (2009)

This rarity out of small-town Oregon is one of the more extreme examples of a "grower" LP I've encountered, and I'm impressed with how record dealer Paul Major quickly identified it as a winner after discovering it in the late 1980s. It took me years to get into it, and I'm still not sure whether it will go through yet another change in my cranium before the day is done. One thing I've learned over the years is not to dismiss LPs that have a samey, or even monotonous, sound too quickly. I think Kristyl was the LP that originally taught me that, and without this precaution in place I might have sold New Dawn as a mediocre Music Machine imitation after a few weeks. Instead it's grown itself into a bit of a Lama favorite.
A major advantage of this album is that it has none of the bad aspects - such as a goodtimey music hall track, or a bad blues attempt - that plague late 1960s LPs. There's no room for that in the New Dawn world, because it has nothing to do with what they want to say. Exactly what it is they want to say I'm not entirely sure, but some tracks deal with a working class experience that sounds genuine to me, while others are brooding, suicidal, like a poor kid on a college scholarship sitting alone in his dorm room and feeling like shit.
The songwriting and playing is late 1960s garage rock, stripped down, minimalistic, removed of everything except the raw core -- an admirable exercise that constantly shifts the focus to the lyrics. The absence of cover versions and the naked, direct communication with the listener is reminiscent of the Bachs album, but New Dawn clearly belongs to a "post"-psychedelic era, full of crashed dreams and an unchanged reality. The use of fuzz guitars on one track seems a surprising extravagance in the humble world of this mysterious band. The playing is competent but unassuming, and the moody vocals never stray into Lizard King theatrics or Steppenwolf machismo. All the pieces in the puzzle fit just right, yet it does not seem overly elaborate, but rather an effect of unconscious purity.
New Dawn is a fine example of how the best rock music in the world has been made by unknown US bands who scraped together the dough to put out a record because they had something to say, and in the process reaped the unexpected benefit of not having to compromise one iota.