Reviews
Chuckanut Drive: Alt-country appeal
By Matt Fu, Bellingham Weekly, December 4-11, 2003
Chuckanut Drive and I go way back. I recall selecting tracks from a Chuckanut Drive Demo to play for my "Local Pick" as a daytime DJ for KUGS back in 1998, well before I had an obsession with the local music scene. The project has come a long way since the reverb-drenched pop of the demo. During the middle of their last live on-air performance on the Corner Pocket - a local music show I host on KUGS - I recalled that they were one of the first acts I had played live on the show. It was only fitting that the final band to perform live on my incarnation of the "Local Show" be Chuckanut Drive. I told them the last song they had to play was "The City That Took You Away," a wonderful, heartfelt number with the chorus "the moon still haunts me when it's full / goddamn that curse you laid on me," a kind of fisticuffs line I like to scream towards Bellingham when I get a little annoyed at how a four-year degree at a local state college turned into a full-fledged love affair of non-metro, smaller town life.
Since that adolescent demo, Chuckanut Drive has released a batch of short run EPs that have mostly been available at local shows and record stores. This relative obscurity has always been a mystery to me, as I recognized early on that Steve Leslie, the songwriter behind the band, is amazingly talented and well versed in the rootsy-Americana tradition the band has progressed along. His sharp, squeaky twang and three-chord delivery was a familiar sound to me long before the O, Brother revival boom and the emergence of the genre's pop icons like Gillian Welch and Ryan Adams. I was always confused to catch the band live and see less-than-large crowds listening in on the beer-drenched laments of this Texas and Tulsa native. That's right, though watered down by our West Coast's sentiments and surrounded by false imitators, Steve's accent is real, folks.
Backed on bass by Aaron Ansley and accentuated on drums by former Chuck Israels jazz student Erik Anderson, the band had a pretty solid alt-country foundation to appeal to. But it wasn't until Loren Huggins, of the Wastelanders, joined the band on lead guitar last February, that things really started to click. Loren's smooth, twangy leads pushed the songs to a new level. His rootsy leanings gave the poppier tracks an extra dancing boot-to-the-face and provided the sadder love songs with a few more deep ounces of tear-soaked beer. These new dynamics come through amazingly well on Chuckanut Drive's first real record, the recently released self-titled eight-songer that they partially recorded and entirely mixed at Lab Partner Studios.
The standout songs on this record is the heartfelt "If You Don't Think It's Right," a song that brought me to tears when Steve first played it solo during one Chuckanut Drive on-air performance. It is well worth any price you pay for the album alone. Loren's additions to this song, and recent live performances of it, have me further confused as to why this band isn't at least a regional sensation. The song is an easy radio hit and a testament to how strong Chuckanut Drive has become as a band. You should hear them now, before the Nashville tug finds these boys fleeing our non-metro, small town indifference.