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“Long Distance Drunk” is the only track on The Lonesome Crowded West that actually sounds like a b-side. On an album full of unabashed guitar rock, “Long Distance Drunk” pushes that instrument to the side, focusing instead on Jeremiah Green’s stuttering beat and Eric Judy’s bass-guitar-by-way-of-moonshine-jug drone. Isaac Brock palm-mutes a simple acoustic chord progression, joining his bandmates in their atmosphere of rhythmic navel-gazing. In between “Out of Gas” and “Shit Luck”, it’s hard for the song not to sound like an interlude. Taken on its own, it fares somewhat better.
“Hang it up now or never”, Brock sings, “Hang it up again”. He sounds tentative, a fitting tone for that slight hesitation that comes before you call your ex on a tequila-fueled whim. “Eight AM and someone calls you on the telephone / You want to be by yourself and all alone”, he’ll sing later, his vocals pushed into the back of the mix, almost an afterthought. It is an afterthought, after all, since he knows he’ll make the call, anyway. You’d do the same thing, wouldn’t you?
The track’s repetitive lyrics don’t hit as hard or in quite the same manner as the rest of Brock’s writing on the album. But then, they’re not supposed to. “Hang it up now or never / Hang it up again / Long distance drunk”—these are the stakes, slight in the bigger picture but painfully large when you’re sitting there with the telephone and a spinning room around you. Nicole Johnson’s airy vocals provide a nice counterpoint to Brock’s plaintiveness and do just enough to keep things from getting too self-indulgent. Perhaps swapping out this track for “Baby Blue Sedan”, (included on the vinyl pressing of the record), would’ve made sense to many fans, but we have “Long Distance Drunk”. Sometimes understatement can work just as well.
