Life's a whole lot like my whiskers: Life is dark, life is short and life is rough.

Readyville is from San Francisco, but named their band after a small town in Tennessee. They use slide guitar and dissonant harmonies and open their songs with lines like “There wasn’t enough whiskey in this city to get you to tell me the truth”.

Yes, Readyville is a genuine alt.country band. And that’s pretty awesome.
Readyville is Nick Palatucci, who plays guitar and sings main vocals which both sneer and ply, and Eoin Galvin, who sings harmony and plays a lot of other instruments including a crazy sad sounding Organaire. Palatucci’s phrasing is powerful and slightly whiny, but only in the best and catchiest of ways. The songs aren’t as pretty as early Whiskeytown, or quite as witty and self-deprecating as the Old 97’s used to be, but they have a whole lot of heart, or maybe just a whole lot of empty place where the heart keeps trying to be. One of the best things about alt.country music is the absurd amount of consciousness it has about being feeling effectively empty. When you listen to alt.country you suddenly realize that everything you do is a little indulgent. That’s the difference between a sort of roots-twinged, mellow sad and the overblown sadness of most intense emo odes. After a break-up you want to complain, but you can see that “I’m making a big deal out of all of this/ I guess you can tell/ I noticed it as well.” Things are pretty shitty and you like to appeal to lost lovers and your own sense of regret, but you become pretty aware of the mess you’ve made. You talk (or sing) things through, and sometimes you just have to admit that “The timing is lousy and the moral's all wrong/ Well, this ain’t the kind of story that ends in a song.”

Readyville is a charming concept, and they come off as smart and kind of messy, with voices breaking over high notes and guitars picking along haphazardly between smart lyrics. They tell stories about reading while drunk, driving all night, and falling off of the ferry. Their album sounds visceral and tipsy, but they are certainly competent. Though the second half of the record is not quite as charming as the first, the cycle of songs about (ex-)girlfriends (“Monica”, which is excellent, “Anne” and “Lorena”) is well-executed. “An El Camino is a Car” is one of the best tracks on the album, even if they seem to only use the line “El Cerrito is a town by the bay” because El Cerrito scans really well with El Camino. It implores the listener, “I hope you’re sitting down dear/ I hope there wasn’t anyone around here/ You’ve been trying to impress.”

Apparently, Readyville wrote and frequently performs a song about the death of one of the Nick’s former roommates, who is still alive and none-too-pleased about his premature memorial. Readyville doesn’t see why he wouldn’t be. After all, one of the best things about alt.country is that you never seem to really have anything when you have it, possibly including life. You’re always hungover or broken up, drunk or driving (though hopefully not both at the same time). Memorials that haven’t happened yet, bewitched by a slide guitar and a sad voice and often-snide lyrics— that is the soul of alt.country music. We know that we aren’t in the center of the world, that we are peripheral and dumb, but we allow ourselves to indulge in a little wallowing. And then we switch off the record and go on living, because we might as well try while we can.