Groove Armada, Goodbye Country (Hello Nightclub)

My infatuation with this album began with �Superstylin��, the infectious, bottom-heavy club single that blew up alongside my burgeoning appreciation for the gay bar where Mark worked, and where Neil and I would disingenuously scam free drinks from the owner, who had a crush on us. We made friends with the other bartenders and the cocktail waitresses and the DJs and got drunk almost every night of the week. We flirted with girls who assumed we were gay and went to after-hours parties where people used their car keys to do bumps and the stereo was inevitably playing this album, or Rooty, or something more incidental like the new Britney or Janet. I didn�t require much beyond my paltry paycheck at Barnes & Noble and several drunken hours a night with Neil. We were poor, frustrated, and unhappily single. It was November 2001, and the world was a mess, so my outlook became more insular, my expectations more humble, my hedonism more focused; the macro was supplanted by the micro.

The weather got worse and the days got shorter, and I found myself working retail during the Christmas ramp-up. I spent the majority of my days in the last place I wanted to be: the mall where the bookstore was located, a regional hub for the rampant consumerism we�d been assured would get our country back on its feet. I watched overweight people stumble clumsily around the food court, in and out of Abercrombie and Hot Topic, looking more like battle-dazed conscripts than proud Americans enjoying their freedom. Like most people, I didn't yet have the emotional stamina to make sense of the deleterious course upon which our country's leadership was about to embark, it would be a while before people had the collective stones to question the excessive but vapid displays of patriotism borne by the flags slapped on the backs of enormous SUVs and shopping sprees in the name of Freedom. So I just clenched my jaw and hoped for the best.

Perhaps that�s how Goodbye Country developed the consolatory effect it still has for me: it was tailor-made to serve two purposes, as both an opiate and a stimulant. Dazed and/or aggravated by the banal trivialities of the day-to-day and the immediacy of an ominous global scenario, I could listen to �Edge Hill� or �Healing� or �Tuning In� and lower my heart rate a little and shut out the noise; then go dance my cares away to songs like �Superstylin�� and �Fogma�. Plenty of albums embody this sort of duality, but few of them do it as elegantly as this one. There�s something so self-contained, so assured and organic, about the comfortable interiors created by the chilled-out gems on this album. About half the songs are more bombastic, pop-oriented tunes crowding the front of the stage (�Suntoucher�, �Superstylin��, "Little By Little", or the car-commercial staple �My Friend�), but they inscribe a complementary orbit around the record�s real heart, which is made up of gorgeous layered sounscapes like �Drifted�, �Healing�, and the wistful goodbye track, �Join Hands�.

The only thing missing from this album is something that�s readily found on the previous one: the downtempo classic �At The River�. For this song, after all, is how I first came to know the group, just before �Superstylin�� dropped. Everything that happened that strange year, good or bad, was complimented and bookended by �At The River�. Sometime the following spring, Neil and I were listening to it and he said it evoked a strange feeling in him, a sort of nostalgia for something that hadn�t yet happened, or that might never happen at all. It�s a song that helped us find solace during a fucked-up, uncertain time. Listening to the way �At The River� couples mournful horns (later reprised on �Join Hands�) with blissed-out vocals and strings, it�s not hard to see how it�and, by extension, Goodbye Country�is a subtle, rarefied example of that sad/beautiful dichotomy. It was the best of times, and the worst of times, but the memories are fond nonetheless.

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