Xavier Rudd
Food in the Belly (Anti)
By Caroline Evans
Published: January 15th, 2007 | 5:36pm
Over the course of five albums, multi-instrumentalist Xavier Rudd has established his persona as a hippie-surfer, singing the earth’s praises while mastering slide guitar, stomp boxes, and didgeridoo. His sixth album keeps it organic and was recorded on an island in British Columbia and laid down on two-inch tape. He continues to explore our connection to Mother Earth on Food in the Belly, but, more subtly, Rudd examines our personal connections to one another, a connection that is fast diminishing in our age of email, instant messaging, and MySpace. But it is the human interaction, not the digital, that has power to change our world. Between the Graceland rhythms of “Famine,” he visits family and friends to see what they think “about the situation,” to which they all reply “Famine on the land / Because the cost of living is so high.”
Later, on “Generation Fade,” he encourages young people that “If your friend has fear / Help him to heal / Show him that difference gives the world its appeal.” The song, a reggae-folk piece evocative of Michael Franti, also asserts the activist message “It was the movement of the people like many times before / Who stood up for peace and sat down for war.”
While Rudd’s instrumental innovation is as fresh on Food in the Belly as it has been in his previous work, there are a few songs that bog the otherwise upbeat and catchy album. The final track, “September 24, 1999,” a peaceful piano ballad, drags on for six minutes with little reward for the diligent listener.
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