The General Store
Local Honey (Not Lame)
by Marc Hirsh

originally published in Space City Rock, Summer 2004

If Local Honey had come out in the mid-1990s, the General Store would’ve been tagged as alt-country, which would have been a mistake. The album is infused with a cosmic cowboy vibe, true, but it’s less the “cowboy” than the “cosmic” part that seems to be pivotal, as Store manager Tam Johnstone psychedelicizes the sometimes rustic instrumentation, so that songs like the opening “Letdown” sound like Wayne Coyne singing druggy, country-based AM pop songs after listening to After The Gold Rush. It’s a neat trick, but there’s a bit too much derivativeness throughout Local Honey; “The Space Between Us” is like a trippier version of Jellyfish’s “Russian Hill” (which was itself pastiche), and the lyrics to “Airport Breakfast” sideswipe “Fly Like An Eagle” and “Eight Miles High” atop what sounds like a Nashville garage band tearing through Elvis Costello’s “Tokyo Storm Warning.” Not only that, “Pretty Eyes” follows the chord progression from Christina Aguilera’s “Beautiful” for a bit too long for comfort (though it’s clearly a coincidence, as Local Honey was released a scant two weeks after Stripped), even as the Nicky Hopkins-style piano returns it to the land of “Don’t Let The Sun Go Down On Me” from whence “Beautiful” came. That makes a bit more sense once you learn that Johnstone’s father Davey has been Elton John’s guitarist since not long after Bernie Taupin entered the picture, but it would be nice if Johnstone the younger ventured out into the great interstellar prairie and claimed his own homestead.

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