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Your support makes all the difference.When Vic Chesnutt first hooked up with fellow Athens, Georgia residents Widespread Panic back in 1993, to form the collective Brute, few had heard of either. Now, Chesnutt is a songwriter of some renown, while Widespread Panic have gone on to become one of America's hottest gigging bands, attracting a massive cult following in the underground manner of the Grateful Dead and Phish. This reunion finds both parties at the top of their game; the band cranking out exultant, anthemic arrangements, which recall the likes of U2, REM, Nirvana and Crazy Horse, behind some of Chesnutt's most compelling songs.
His is a dark, cynical worldview, in which all the veils and excuses are ripped aside to leave the bare emotional truth – most bleakly in "Cobalt" itself, where a sexual liaison is ruthlessly anatomised in the manner of a wildlife programme: "They acted out of instinct/ They performed precisely as mathematics dictated." Equally desolate is "All Kinds": a brutal survey of outcasts, from the lonely junkie whose only friends are "dealers and dodos", to the internet-porn freak whose "sad obsession is a digital impression of a darling little girl". Not that Chesnutt is immune to his own unflinching gaze, as he chides someone for "starting rumours that we are lovers/ when the only thing that I've been sleeping with is the Cutty Sark". Which only makes his empathic treatment of blue-collar workers in songs such as "Adirondacks" and "Expiration Day" all the more moving: the latter being not so much about the dignity of labour as the defining nature of an occupation.
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