Drag the River: Bad at Breaking Up

Drag the River
Bat at Breaking Up
Suburban Home
2009-02-24

So it would seem. After prematurely announcing their dissolution in 2007, the Ft. Collins, Colorado, band has dropped a spate of releases lately, peppered with the tantalizingly infrequent live show. Lucky for us: when it comes to songwriting, Jon Snodgrass and Chad Price are a dynamic duo on par with Patterson Hood and Mike Cooley from Drive by Truckers. While we wait for new material, the gents and Suburban Home have teamed up to drop this elegantly packaged disc compiling 20 Drag the River tracks from seven-inches, b-sides, and splits. Their tag-team of Sam Cooke’s “Having a Party” opens the proceedings, and the songs are split pretty evenly between Snodgrass and Price songs for the duration. Bad at Breaking Up asserts Drag the River definitively as one of America’s finest roots bands. “A Way with Women” and “I Remember Now” are two of the higher points, but there really isn’t a bad song here.

RATING 6 / 10