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TAKE ME HOME: A TRIBUTE TO JOHN DENVER

(Badman)

The brainchild of Red House Painters frontman Mark Kozelek, Take Me Home enlists a fleet of shoegazing minimalists to pay homage to fallen country-folk icon John Denver. Aggressively earnest and never even ironically hip, Denver would seem an unlikely target for the affections of inveterate indie sadcore types like Tarnation and Low (a poem on the disc's inner sleeve equates Denver with the artists' more innocent childhoods, which may be the answer). It's telling that no one actually takes on the title track, but many of Denver's other hits are accounted for. Thanks to kid-glove treatment from slo-fi acts both great (the Innocence Mission) and small (the Sunshine Club?), Denver's open, airy compositions translate better than you might expect. Tarnation turn "Leaving on a Jet Plane" into an ethereal dirge; the Red House Painters' stark, gorgeous version of "I'm Sorry" is their best work in years, and Bonnie Prince Billy, otherwise known as Palace's Will Oldham, dispatches Denver's famed "The Eagle and the Hawk" with creaky aplomb.

-- Allison Stewart