HADACOL "Better Than This" Checkered Past
Geoffrey Himes
* 03/26/99
The Washington Post
Copyright 1999, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved
Hadacol is a Kansas City quartet named after the
alcohol-laden 24-proof "patent medicine" that sponsored Hank
* Williams's radio show in the 1940s. Like most alternative-country
acts, Hadacol mixes twangy guitars, drawling vocals and a thumping
rhythm in a manner that sounds conversational and nervously urgent at
the same time. Unlike most of its genre colleagues, however, Hadacol's
songwriters -- brothers Fred and Greg Wickham -- know how to boil the
usual Americana themes down to an ear-grabbing chorus melody and a
stick-in-the-mind aphorism. As a result, the band's debut album,
"Better Than This," rises above the cluttered landscape of
"insurgent-country" discs.
The two singer-guitarist Wickham brothers write songs
separately but with a similar sensibility and standard of quality.
Fred, for example, wrote the title tune, which refuses to whine about
trailer-park life but in fact celebrates it in a rousing chorus. Even
better is his "What You Wanted," an organ-fueled, Dylanesque
folk-rocker about living with the consequences of your decisions. Greg
wrote "Cheap Liquor," which sums up the limitations of the bar-band
life in the priceless line, "All this barroom smoke feels like a
girlfriend's arms." Giving all the songs the clarity of a
three-minute, 1950s single is the production by fellow Missourian Lou
Whitney of the Skeletons.
