Ecstatic Peace
2009
Hard Knox
About This Album
James Jackson Toth is the former frontman and chief songwriter for the indie post-hippie unit Wooden Wand. Hard Knox is a collection of songs demoed at one time or another for possible inclusion on Wooden Wand recordings, rather than on his solo offerings (hence the moniker "Wand" listed on the cover). "The Wand" writes a long apologia liner essay in which he defends himself, if not his songs, on the sleeve of the digipack cover of this CD. He claims to know that most demo collections are mostly bogus. And he's right. He then goes on to defend himself by claiming these tracks are actually songs rather than his experiments in "doom zydeco" or "surf harmonica." Apparently he has many more of these collections -- but says he's spared us 95 percent of them and we should be grateful. So why didn't these songs make it onto Wooden Wand recordings proper? Disregarding his own reasons for not releasing them -- and he details them in the essay -- they're simply substandard as songs. Some melodies are so sketchy that they're barely there ("Chrome"); in others the lyrics are so obvious and repetitive that the tracks are a bore (even a song with a bridge, such as "Lady of Situations") or the lyrical concepts are so wordy and obtuse and the melodies so unimaginative that one wonders why they're included here.
Track List (try tracks 4,7,11,13 and 14)

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