Love Tractor
THE SKY AT NIGHT
(Razor and Tie)

It’s fitting in a way that the Steely Dan of the mid-’80s Southern-pop revival have released their first album in 12 years right after Becker and Fagin got a Grammy for their comeback. The Dan comparison, moreover, is apt. Love Tractor were a great live act, as their unlikely 1987 cover of the Gap Band’s " Party Train " suggested. But at their best these precious college-radio darlings combined the herky-jerk of Pylon and the graceful arpeggios of early R.E.M. with a kind of icy, meticulous virtuosity: they were a bar band totally comfortable layering overdubs in a sterile recording studio.

Nothing’s changed on The Sky at Night. One listen to the delicate, folkie, guitar lattice work and vocal harmonies on " US Desert " or the trebly bliss of " Palace of Illusion " (trimmed with killer, circa 1986 keyboard bursts) and you’ll swear the ’90s never happened. Then again, on the mostly instrumental " Birthday of Time, " a film soundtrack waiting for a film, Love Tractor prove themselves honest-to-God precursors of spacy, ambient techno. But forget about " relevance " and the thinness of some of the songwriting here. For any one-time high-school kid from suburban nowhere who imagined Athens as a dreamy, jangle-pop paradise, The Sky at Night will be as evocative as Proust’s madeleine.

Issue Date: April 19 - 25, 2001