Long Road Out of Eagles

The Eagles have just released Long Road Out of Eden, their first new album in two decades. Half of it is a triumphant return to the bleached blonde country sound that made them great. The other half is bloated pretentious nonsense where Don Henley sings crap like “We worship at the marketplace while common sense is going out of style.” Yeah, consumerism is destroying us, isn’t it, Don? Incidentally, the new Eagles album is available exclusively at Wal-Mart.

Thankfully, Eden is a double album, and they’ve kept the political drivel pretty well isolated on the second CD. Disc One is politics free, except for the execrable opening track, “No More Walks In The Wood,” a ponderous a capella ballad lamenting the fact that all the forests in the world have been cut down, presumably to make paper for the twenty-page booklet that accompanies the CD.

The album soars with the next track, “How Long,” which sounds right at home when compared to Eagles classics like “Take It Easy” and “The Long Run.” It’s the first single off the album, and it’s easy to see why. It’s a joyous, pseudo-country celebration, and it may be the best track of the whole album, but it’s not necessarily an easy call. The rest of Disc One is just as good, although the Timothy B. Schmidt numbers are heavy on the schmaltz, and even in his apolitical “relationship” songs, Don Henley repeatedly demonstrates why he ought to be force fed anti-depressants. Later, on Disc Two, Henley sings: “It’s a soul-sucking, soul-sucking, soul-sucking, soul-sucking, soul-sucking, soul-sucking world,” ignoring the fact that when he sings, he’s the one sucking the souls. Have you ever been cheerful, Don? Have you never been mellow?

Henley is the real problem here. His distinctive, smoky tenor voice has made him the group’s centerpiece, which is just fine as long as he’s lending said voice to decent material. Instead, as we wander into the wilderness of Disc Two, Henley uses his considerable vocal talents to sing Noam Chomsky’s Greatest Hits. Don sings better than Noam, but that’s about it.

Consider the album’s title track, “Long Road Out of Eden,” which kicks off the second disc. It’s endless – over ten minutes long – as well as endlessly silly. Henley contrasts the experience of a soldier on patrol in Iraq with oil company executives blasting music from their SUVs in the “good ol’ USA,” where they eat lunch at the “Petroleum Club, smokin’ fine cigars and swapping lies” and say things like “gimme ‘nother slice o’ that barbecued brisket.” You’re being very subtle - just what you’re trying to say here, Don? Don’t smoke? You’re not particularly fond of barbecued brisket?

No. In case you missed the moral of the story, Henley ends the song by telling you flat out that “the road to empire is a bloody, stupid waste.” See, the point is that oil company execs are very bad. No blood for oil. We shall overcome, or something.

Henley’s gasbaggery is followed by a brief instrumental from Glenn Frey called “I Dreamed There Was No War,” Apparently, when there’s no war, people will strum namby-pamby little ditties that will conjure images of Saddam Hussein and Barney holding hands and skipping through flower beds. The Eagles’ grasp of geopolitical realities is equivalent to that of my six-year-old son, who thinks that Worm Man and Fox Man should stop blowing up buildings and just go jump on the trampoline together. I’d be happy to do that if they would. And they wouldn’t. So unilaterally jumping on the trampoline doesn’t do anyone any good.

Still, Henley doesn’t give up. In “Business as Usual,” he complains that “we’ve got the prettiest White House that money can buy, sitting up there in that Beltway Bubble.” In what may be the album’s most tedious polemic, “Frail Grasp on the Big Picture,” Don laments about how stupid all of us are, mainly because we “pray to our Lord, who we know is American.” How ignorant. Everyone knows that God is Belgian.

Henley clearly despises the USA, which leads one to wonder why he bothers to stay here. After all, this nation is an oppressive empire builder, a wretched police state that suppresses the delicate genius that is Henley. What these troubled junior high school poets fail to recognize is that if they were really living in a police state, they’d be strung up by their thumbs in Hussein’s rape rooms or Ahmejinedad’s Homes for Non-Existent Homosexuals. They wouldn’t have their CDs cluttering up the Wal-Mart sales racks.

Disc Two isn’t all bad. It has a nice little Joe Walsh number called “Last Good Time In Town” that is reminiscent of his earlier “Pretty Maids All in a Row.” The album ends with a strange Glenn Frey track called “It’s Your World Now,” where he sounds like he’s either going to die or play bingo. “My race is run,” he says, “I’m moving on, like the setting sun.” Apparently, we shouldn’t expect a follow up album any time soon.

That’s OK. There’s plenty to enjoy here for now. Transfer Disc One into your iPod without the first track, and pick and choose a few tracks of Disc Two. Then throw the CDs away along with your leftover barbecued brisket.