★★★★★
"I'm gonna play my guitar 'til my fingers fall off / Sing 'til my voice is gone," Rhett Miller begins on the song "Wasted"; "They might think I've wasted my life / they're wrong." And thus we have the general conceit of Most Messed Up, the Old 97's' tenth studio album in the twenty years since their 1994 debut Hitchhike to Rhome. It's a milestone, one these boys are clearly ready to celebrate--with some truth-telling, some yarn-spinning, and whole lot of alcohol...
- cokemachineglow.com
2014-05-29
★★★★★
Rhett Miller exhales prior to jumping into the raison d'etre for
- www.austinchronicle.com
2014-05-22
★★★★★
Release Date: April 29, 2014 After bouncing between record labels for the better part of the last decade, Old 97s are back in the saddle in a big way. Most Messed Up, their debut for ATO Records, is the band's most freewheeling, ragged and defiant record of their career. Though it's not their best, it's a compelling work that frequently shows why the band has been beloved for the last three decades...
- absolutepunk.net
2014-05-03
★★★★★
Twenty years is a long time. Go ahead and think about what you were doing in 1994. Things were a bit different then. So different, in fact, that looking back on that mid-'90's era feels at times like peering into some distant time capsule that exists now only in the dusty photo albums and crispy yellowed newsprint of the pre-internet age. You can YouTube old clips from that time, but man, they're tough to watch and focus on with their standard-definition grainy resolution and wavy feed...
- www.popmatters.com
2014-05-01
★★★★★
In 1977, Jackson Browne dropped what might be the ultimate rock 'n' roll album about the rock 'n' roll lifestyle. Recorded live, and on tour busses and in hotel rooms, the album practically seethes of the drugs, the groupies and the roadies that populate road life. But this isn't a review about Running on Empty - as great as it might be (and if you haven't heard it, go now and check it out). This is a review of the 10th album from West Texas country rock outfit Old 97's...
- www.popmatters.com
2014-05-01
★★★★★
"We've been doing this longer than you've been alive," Rhett Miller sings on the opening, near six minute track that is often brutal in its honesty of the trials and tribulations of the rock and roll lifestyle. And he should know since the band's ATO debut heralds its 20th year in the business. Considering their modest success, that's a remarkable run for the Dallas quartet...
- www.americansongwriter.com
2014-04-30
★★★★★
Rhett Miller's got two things down: love and nausea. Miller has spent 20-plus years fronting the Old 97's, and the sprawling ruckus of the band's liquor-soaked decades is summed up succinctly in the group's umpteenth album Most Messed Up . Since the early '90s, the alt-country group from Dallas has been continuously churning out some of the most off-kilter cowpoke crunk...
- www.avclub.com
2014-04-29
★★★★★
On this most Old 97's-ish of Old 97's LPs, the hard-partying twang-punk quartet throw a 20th-birthday bash for themselves. In the tradition of boozy anniversaries, it begins with a victory speech: "Longer Than You've Been Alive" pays tribute to "20 good years of about 25," confessing, "Our jobs are all jobs/And sometimes they suck." Then it's yet another round of airtight songs celebrating life-as-sublime-train-wreck amid music that conjures the British Invasion landing in a Texas barroom...
- www.rollingstone.com
2014-04-29
★★★★★
Old 97's frontman Rhett Miller has spent the past two decades drawing up character studies of the heartbroken, the drunken and the depraved. In the band's early days it was easy for Miller to write about the goings-on of a budding rock star, but as time wore on, the characters became just that--although perhaps thinly veiled versions of himself.
"I guess there's an element of autobiography with the debauchery that happens in the songs," Miller told me a few years ago...
- www.pastemagazine.com
2014-04-30