Consumer Guide Album

Camper Van Beethoven: Camper Van Beethoven [Pitch-a-Tent, 1986]
Without benefit of a "Skinheads" or a "Bad Trip," this is the most convincing of the three very good albums they've dashed off in a year and a half--sixteen tracks, eclectic in a panfolkrock mode that now seems unselfconscious if not inevitable, even the instrumentals equipped with words of one sort of another sometimes. Their stance is bemused when it's not just spaced out, and their "Interstellar Overdrive" is too conceptual for my tastes. But I reserve the right to read good politics into the likes of "Joe Stalin's Cadillac" (is LBJ's Cadillac is Somoza's Cadillac is General Pinochet's Cadillac is my Cadillac I'd like to drive it off a bridge has anyone seen the bridge). So far their productivity seems proof against the desperate indulgences that can overcome talented bands with dodgy commercial prospects. They're an encouraging aberration in a bad time. I wish them a tour bus w/driver that never lets them down. A