Audio CD review:
Machinery Hall - Tear It Down

Machinery Hall - Tear It Down

Band: Machinery Hall Title: Tear It Down Rating: Release Date: 2001-01-05 Media: Audio CD Tracks: 1: Wearily 2: Peg 3: Center Me 4: Atta 5: Someday 6: Nif 7: 30 Years 8: Let Me Go 9: Color of Good 10: Who I Am 11: Tear it Down

They woulda been superstars 5 years ago His band's long-awaited new album, Tear It Down, might be the best recording these hometown heroes have ever produced. What do you get when you take a white guy with a voice like Hootie's (only considerably more soulful), and give him Leonard Cohen's gift for writing sardonically literate songs? Why, you get Machinery Hall's Mark Nelson, of course. These thirteen grittily produced songs rock with an unnatural ferocity due to the power of Nelson's AC/DC-worthy guitar riffs and lyrics as straightforward and dead-on as the music that supports them. It's the ballads "Nif" and "Color of Good," however, which are the real standouts here: "You are the only one who ever got to me," sings Nelson in "Nif," and to his credit, he manages to make an ordinarily clichéd line sound transcendent. It's unfortunate that this album is only coming out now instead of five years ago, because these tunes are simply made for the disaffected youth who are currently (and unfortunately) enamored with baseball-hat-wearing frat-boy "rappers" instead of musicians with real substance like Machinery Hall. Expect to hear Tear It Down in heavy radio rotation on MTV and radio when the economy takes its inevitable downslide. Tear It Down I particularly liked Wearily (I always thought he was saying Warily) and Tear It Down. I thought this was a really good CD but they're much better live. They're a local Boston band but they've been getting some national airplay too. You can see a complete list of all Machinery Hall discography, or go back to the Machinery Hall tabs