Mojave 3
Mojave 3: 1995-2006
4AD
For five full albums across 11 years, Slowdive’s Rachel Goswell and Neil Halstead—together with drummer Ian McCutcheon—found their way beyond Brit shoegaze and into something spookier, more American and gothically country. That might not sound like such a big deal now, but when Mojave 3 came out of the gate with the haunted harmonies of 1995’s Ask Me Tomorrow, and kept making amorphous, hazily atmospheric, and overarchingly complex C&W folk up until Puzzles Like You a decade later with no one else in their lane, the effect was mesmeric—influential to future mope-twang radicals like Iron & Wine, My Morning Jacket, and, certainly, the legendarily cinematic Sparklehorse.
Now, for the first time, Mojave 3’s entire catalog is released in one swoop, clearly and cleanly remastered at Abbey Road Studios and packaged with an exclusive slipcase comprising all five albums on clear vinyl, an art print, and updated photography by Colin Gray on Ask Me Tomorrow’s cover. Listening to Mojave’s five melancholic albums 20 years after the project’s demise is like reading Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, Cannery Row, and East of Eden during a sweep of the Santa Ana winds, after your father’s funeral: sad yet unforgettable, and better for having gone through it all, bravely and bracingly.
Without Slowdive’s wall of sweeping, distorted guitars to hide behind, Halstead the composer and lyricist was able to move nakedly from funny abstracted sentiment into what felt like personally woeful tales of emotional shipwrecking (let’s also give it up for the additional faithful Mojave 2 of slide-guitarist Simon Rowe and organist-pianist Alan Forrester). Here, ideas of getting away from getting away (2000’s Excuses for Travelers), longing for loss (1998’s Out of Tune), and bitchy bittersweetness (Ask Me Tomorrow) offered up a wordy palette of heartbreak for Halstead and Goswell—the British John Doe and Exene, since X is the best comparison I can give to Mojave 3 for their display of ragged Americana—to heatedly harmonize through.
While the sorrowful sound of Ask Me Tomorrow was stripped-to-bone, bare-assed, and beautiful for it, the tone of the humid and dustily sun-dappled was implied within its melodies. Move a few years forward toward Out of Tune and there’s an ever-so-slight richness to be found in its soft brass blasts, its humming Hammond organ, and a lilting lap steel on “Give What You Take” that reminds you why Dylan hooked up with The Band in the first place. Fuller still, however, is the swooping, tingling tones of melodica and glockenspiel that fill their Jimmy Webb–like Spoon and Rafter from 2003, and the full-on rock-out of 2006’s Puzzles Like You, a bolder LP of belted-forth country power ballads and chugging, truck-driving anthems.
What’s funny about these latter two albums in the Mojave 3 catalog is how, rather than sound as if they’d sold out their spare, sullen souls for brawny success, these final trio recordings come across like grander progressions of the band’s vision of hillbilly heartache and dustbowl prairie romanticism.
