Realistically Speaking : Son Volt Captures the Country’s Gritty, Back-Roads Underbelly in Musical Contradictions

Drive around the back roads and declining districts of small-town America, and you are likely to experience a benumbing sensation of isolation, dissolution and cold. Still,there’s an existential poetry to the ugliness, a grainy, black-and-white reality that can fascinate and anesthetize as much as it may repel.

Jay Farrar--singer, guitarist and principal songwriter for Son Volt--is adroit at capturing the curious allure of the decaying landscape. His lyrics are dour but peppered with ironic wit, his voice the tuneless monotone of man in the throes of anomie. Like the scenarios he outlines in song, he sounds depressed and constipated, but there’s an undeniable attraction to his often bleak visions of hard times, a beaten-down proletariat and “lakes known for cancer.”

Perhaps his muse was sparked when he was a small boy growing up in Belleville, Ill. He is a man of few words in conversation, but he remembers well the years he spent in the depressed borough.

“It was a medium-sized, conservative town [where there was] not a lot to do,” he recalled during a recent interview, on a motel room phone from a tour stop in Chicago. “It was suffering an economic setback when I was growing up because the Stag Beer factory had closed down. It was a pretty unremarkable place. You got a certain sense of isolation there; it made you more impressionable. . . . Most of my songs are written from experience. Some are not real specific. They’re more like composites or impressions.”

Farrar, who now lives in New Orleans, is joined in Son Volt by multi-instrumentalist Dave Boquist, bassist Jim Boquist (Dave’s brother) and drummer Mike Heidorn who, along with Farrar, was a member of the roots-rock cult favorite band Uncle Tupelo. Son Volt plays tonight at the Coach House in San Juan Capistrano.

Instrumentally, Son Volt is a seductive bundle of musical contradictions. One minute it sounds like a traditional Dust Bowl string band; the next, it sounds like a punked-up Crazy Horse on steroids. Its debut album, “Trace,” leaves a lasting impression for its nonchalant eclecticism and its finely honed, almost cinematic perspective.

“A lot of it reflects the kind of music I’m interested in, what I listen to,” said Farrar, 28. “A lot of that is older country and blues ballads that don’t really contain a lot of feel-good lyrical matter. When I was young, there was a lot of country music around the house, so some of that stuck. Hank Williams, Woody Guthrie, Jimmie Rodgers, the Carter Family--those are the records my parents had.

“Then I began to listen to Beatles-type rock ‘n’ roll and from there to American garage bands, and from there it went to being taken with punk rock for a while, the Ramones, the Clash and all that.”

Son Volt’s secret weapon, aside from Farrar’s considerable songwriting, is Dave Boquist, whose work on guitar, fiddle, banjo, lap steel and dobro gives the group a wide canvas on which to work, and adds a dose of hillbilly authenticity to the music.

“Dave has a zeal for quite a panorama of instruments,” Farrar said. “We try different instruments on different songs just to see what will work. He definitely helps the process a lot. He can take it to many different places.”

It is heartening that a group such as Son Volt, with a sound that is oddly ‘90s even as it respects the past, can get signed to a major label (Warner Bros.) and hit a relatively large audience. It seemed that only a short time ago that a group that made any discernible nod to the past immediately was consigned to obscurity.

But along with such bands as the Jayhawks, Perfect Stranger and Southern Culture on the Skids, Son Volt appears to signal a new willingness on the part of the big record companies to consider the merits of America’s musical roots.

“I guess there’s more acceptance these days of groups that have a sound that’s . . . I won’t say ‘roots rock,’ but that at least have a certain appreciation for older forms of music,” Farrar said. “Those bands always seem to be around, but at different times there seems to be different levels of awareness, levels of acceptance.

“Things are going good so far. If there’s a goal, it’s just to keep doing what we’re doing.”

* Son Volt and Supernovice play tonight at the Coach House, 33157 Camino Capistrano, San Juan Capistrano. 8 p.m. $8. (714) 496-8930.