Album Notes

These are the times that try mankind's soul and Gooding's latest studio offering, Soldiermaking, serves as a snapshot of this decade of our discontent, capturing us scatter-souled citizens in full paranoid ache. Not that Soldiermaking, registers as a bummer. While the opening "Rank and File," propelled by Jesse Reichenberger's martial beats, wears deeper a path paved by Don Henley's "The End of the Innocence" and even the more comprehensible moments of the Dave Matthews Band's "Don't Drink the Water," Gooding's complaint differs in that it asks us to lead rather than be led.
That hopeful spirit is there on "This Way Child," where strength once more emerges from Reichenberger's sticks, and "Nice Day (If It Doesn't Rain)," where Reichenberger and bassist Billy Driver shine as much as Gooding himself. It's even there on the closing "Small Moves," (where Gooding sings, "This is America but it's not my dream"), a track that could have easily, in the hands of a lesser artist, slipped into amoebalike navel-gazing coffeehouse rock but instead emerges as a super dose of universal truth.
Not that Gooding's moved strictly to the territory of the head from the territory of the heart. He pays a visit on the soft, enigmatic "Forgotten Family Noise," the cinematic "The Killing Sea" and on "Already Gone," a track that calls to mind the pleasant bruise of U2's "Ultraviolet (Light My Way)" from Achtung Baby. And while musically very different, both Soldiermaking and Achtung Baby find their power in the cracks and crevices of the human heart, those distances that seem too narrow to explore but where high-caliber artists never stray from.