Hard Working Americans

Overview

Let me explain what it’s like to summarize Rest in Chaos. What you have here is, in the first place, the book of Genesis as deftly reconceived by Todd Snider who has been inhabited by a spirit resembling Philip K. Dick. The rest of the Hard Working Americans are under the direction (or perhaps in the thrall) of an older wiser Jimi Hendrix and a Frank Zappa no less exacting than he was when he departed. It is rock’n’roll music, past, present and future, and that’s no dream, it’s just a fact. There are moments here when the walls of Babel might be falling, there are moments when they are reinvented and every time you try to pin it down, it shows you something else.

“Half Ass Moses,” the third song, ends by declaring “The song wasn’t all that complicated.”
Like hell it isn’t. When, in the very next song, “Dope is Dope,” Todd Snider is a voice more inflammatory and gritty than I have ever heard from him before, “His mother didn’t understand him / Whose mother ever does?” am I supposed to laugh, cry, applaud or beg for mercy. All that’s really sure is, you’re not leaving ‘til the show’s over. Even if you want to. There’s nowhere else to go, and even if there were, the music’s too good.