Hot Water Music

GUYS! Do NOT let your girlfriends listen to this. What’s happened is Chuck Ragan and crew have fucked up the curve of masculinity, and NOTHING YOU EVER DO will be manly enough. EVER. I am pretty sure that Hot Water Music has taken the last eight years since their last album using gasoline as aftershave and drag racing in cars they built by hand.

The album starts off with the track “Mainline,” which is probably a reference to how they ingest the pure testosterone that they’ve been ingesting. The track shows that you can have ass-kicking punk songs AND solid production. It doesn’t have to sound like shit to be punk, kids, and HWM proves it.

I could go through the musical and aesthetic merits of each track, but it would just make me feel bad about myself. Instead, I will just tell you, put it on, don’t tell anyone about your man crush on Ragan and make sure to turn that shit off the second your lady walks in the door.

-Jonathan Yost

Skiba’s become the Wooderson of punk bands; he gets older, but his lyrics stay the same age. I mean, I love me some Alkaline Trio, but “Luciferian Blues?” “Angel of Deaf?!” What is that? Are you 17? Come on Skeebs, please stop playing Magic: The Gathering while in the studio and get some new material.

That said, me from 2001 loves it. I mean, it’s Alkaline Trio without Dan Adriano balancing out Skeebs’ attempt to CHANNEL HIS INNER ADAM ANT. The Sekrets (WITH A K, MATT?!) are probably his biggest enablers, with AFI’s bassist Hunter Burgan and Jarrod Alexander, the drummer from My Chemical Romance, giving him product recommendations. As ridiculous as I think it is, I can’t stop listening to it. I suppose there’s a lesson about not judging people on what they look like or something, but I don’t care to go searching for it.
-Jonathan Yost

Joyce Manor, whatever will I do with you? You’re so good, but such a tease. 9 songs? I know it’s a punk record, but COME ON! Clocking in at a whopping thirteen minutes long, this record was twice as long and twice as hard as my last hump session. But unlike the lady involved, OATIWSGT leaves me wanting more. Good work, fellas.

-Jonathan Yost

Photos by Chris Lopez

Electric Six
Heartbeats & Brainwaves
Metropolis Records
8/10

With Electric Six’s Heartbeats & Brainwaves—the disco-punk-metal’s eighth album in nine years—the Detroit-based sextet may not break any new ground, but therein lays their charm. Arguably the most prolific band in existence right now, singer Dick Valentine and his five cohorts are content to crank out their brand of earnest inanity, and they aren’t all that interested in changing up their formula for broader appeal; one gets the impression their flirtation with the mainstream at the outset of their career was enough for them. They’re something of the indie realm’s equivalent to AC/DC—debauched, innuendo-spewing rockers who refuse to take themselves seriously and whose only concerns seem to be having fun and bringing their fans along for the ride.

That’s not to say the band doesn’t add a little spice to their familiar concoction. For the first time since his debut-album duet with Jack White (I’m sorry, “John S. O’Leary,” *nudge, wink*), Valentine shares lead vocal duties on several tracks. “It Gets Hot” is the band’s first foray into hip-hop, courtesy guest rapper Andy D.’s appearance during the bridge, while “Interchangeable Knife” finds Electric Six at their most experimental, thanks to a reappearance by Andy D. and some childlike female crooning from She Bits (c’mon, it’s not like anyone on an Electric Six record will have anything other than a stage name). The album also finds the band returning to some of its ‘80s electro-synth pop roots, an element downplayed on their last couple of releases. Keyboardist Tait Nucleus? (don’t question the question mark) in particular shines, reaffirming his spot as the band’s unsung hero after having his contributions mitigated of late.

Opener “Psychic Visions” finds Valentine hamming up his best Nick Cave impression over a wall of down-tempo synth lines and drum machine beats, though the foreboding gives way to befuddlement once one starts listening to the lyrics. Truly, Valentine’s trademark coupling of witty wordplay with nonsense to make a successful rhyme is in fine form throughout the album, and the first song adequately sets the stage—“I see her dancing in the Latin quarter/Abbreviations make everything shorter.” It only gets more confounding from there with “Don’t take away my good time drinking problem/Don’t mind my demons when they speak to you” (“I Go Through Phases”) and “Now she’s living on a fiery line/with a fridge filled with French bacon/Mouthing all the words of a famous mime/For which she’s commonly mistaken” (“French Bacon”). The specter of Captain Beefheart looms heavy here, something Valentine directly addresses in “Food Dog,” aping a few of the Captain’s lyrics from “Floppy Boot Stomp.”

The head-scratching charisma Valentine oozes comes down to this prevalent absurdity. He delivers every lyric, no matter how ludicrous, with the utmost authority and conviction. Take “Gridlock!” for example: “Science is just a suspension of belief/A way to explain away the grief/And every policeman needs a chief.” As soon as he’s about to touch on something profound, there comes the jackknife turn to the ridiculous. He’s funny, sure, but in a six-degrees-removed kind of way. Is he funny despite his attempts to be sincere, or vice versa? If it’s a joke he’s singing, he’s not in on it, even though he’s the one who penned it. He exists, nay, thrives, in that thin netherworld between clever and stupid. Plus, it doesn’t hurt that he is a genuinely gifted vocalist with quite a range (think of him as a more accessible Mike Patton), though again, his macho-baritone may be one long bit or irony.

The band continues the contradictions that define them, such as the direct subtlety of Valentine’s sex-dripping lyrics in “It Gets Hot,” the intense indifference of “Free Samples,” the self-aware ignorance of “The Intergalactic Version” (“We write the same song over and over again”), and social commentary mixed with decadence in “We Use the Same Products.” With that last one, the question is again raised—are they criticizing consumerism and superficiality, or are they mocking artists who are serious in using rock as a medium for airing their discontent? Regardless, their bread-and-butter catchiness remains intact, evidenced by the wild abandon, sing-along choruses (“Hello!/I seeeee you/Hello!/Therrrrre” and “Free samples/They’re giving shit awaaaayyyy”) and the can’t-help-but-move-to-it grooves.

Of course, with every E6 album, there are duds, something the band probably recognizes as a means of proving nothing is perfect, that everything must have its warts to be authentic. “Bleed For The Artist” and “Eye Contact” are the throw-aways.

Will Heartbeats & Brainwaves win Electric Six any new fans? Nah, probably not, but for those who have stuck by them for years, it is a welcome addition to the band’s repertoire.
-Cole Waterman

At age 61, the maestro of conjuring melody from junkyard clatter, sideshow soundscapes, and barstool serenades has released his most concise work to date. The 13 songs—16 on the deluxe edition—are direct and immediate as a punch to the gut, perhaps a reaction to the triple-album sprawl of Waits’s rarities compilation, Orphans: Brawlers, Bawlers, & Bastards.

More than ever before, the seminal Waits tips his hat to his own influences and peers. “Get Lost” sounds as though Waits has been mounted by the shade of Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, the ramshackle frenzy of brass clanging together like the finest of the bokor’s rave-ups, while the demented title track comes across as a nod to Nick Cave.

“Satisfied” is a rollicking blues number, a response to Muddy Waters’s “I Can’t Be Satisfied.” Waits blusters and brays about how he is going to be gratified, even if he has to break through your ribcage and rip contentment straight from your heart. The song takes on a bit of a meta quality thanks to the presence of Keith Richards on guitar and Waits name-checking both he and his songwriting partner: “Now Mr. Jagger and Mr. Richards/I will scratch where I been itchin’.” The song also showcases Waits’s knack for warping the grotesque into the poetic in the opening, “When I’m gone/Roll my vertebrae out like dice/Let my skull be a home for the mice/Let me bleach like the bones on a beach/I’ll be hard like a pit from a peach.” How fitting is it that the accompanying grainy black-and-white video features Waits lurching around like an epileptic zombie whose scenes were cut from Night of the Living Dead? The definition of danse macabre.

Richards returns to duet with Waits on “Last Leaf on the Tree.” The song continues the Waitsian tradition of pathos-eliciting balladry and is the most heartrending piece on the album, an ode to one’s own resilience, at once defiant and mournful. “Kiss Me,” with its despair masquerading as hope, is a self-referential nod to Waits’s own early years on the Asylum label, sounding like it could have hailed from Blue Valentine. And were Johnny Cash still around, the country waltz “Back in the Crowd” would surely have appeared on his next American Recording. It’s not all doom, though; there’s a fair helping of the glitter.

“Chicago” romanticizes the notion of forsaking stagnancy on a whim for the chance of a better life. One gets the impression Waits is of the mind that the act of plunging into the unknown is the objective, not merely the means of achieving it. It’s about the adventure, not the arrival. And it can’t be an accident that a song called “Chicago” is carried by Waits’s best Howlin’ Wolf impression.

Similarly, “Face to the Highway” conjures the mood of a long-time coming drive out of town, of heading down a deserted stretch of highway at 4 in the morning as an endless series of overpass lights stream by. But where “Chicago” lauds solidarity as a means to foster bravery and inspire bold decisions, “Face to the Highway” credits the narrator’s abandonment of another as necessary, that it is the road and freedom or a stilted existence in a prison cell that lies before him.

Bad As Me also builds on Waits’s ever-increasing dabbling with political matters, featuring no less than two finger-pointing ditties.

“Talking at the Same Time” bemoans the futility of American politics, the Sisyphian nature and influence of selfish interests increasingly defining the process. “We bailed out all the millionaires/They got the fruit/We got the rind” he hisses like a coiled snake in his smoothest falsetto yet. No more are his pipes shrill and alarming when tapping into a higher register. Well, not as alarming; Waits will always carry a sense of dread in his vocal cords, something that can’t help but make your heart flutter in unease. The melody and seesaw rhythm evoke the soundtrack to a 1940s film noir; one can envision a sleazy gumshoe chain-smoking in the neon blue haze of a no-tell motel somewhere in the Deep South.

The second political number, “Hell Broke Luce,” is the most challenging, and engaging, track on the record. Equal parts blues stomp, field holler, and military march, the pastiche is a dispatch from the frontlines of war. Waits doesn’t shy from addressing the innate absurdity of war, and makes no bones about depicting the horror in appropriately profane terms: “Listen to the general, every goddamn word/How many ways can you polish up a turd?” Rumor is, the song was inspired by Jeff Lucey, a U.S. Marine who returned to America from combat in Iraq only to commit suicide. The industrial rattle of melodies and instruments competing for dominance make for an unsettling listen, with Waits sounding like Old Scratch reversing the tides of damnation, unleashing his hordes on the world. Now it may be a coincidence, but an interrupting tuba solo amid the bedlam can’t help but be reminiscent Waits’s own “God’s Away on Business;” is the message here that when God’s away, the Devil will play?

Following such a tour of chaos, the morning-after feel of “New Year’s Eve” is a bit of a letdown. That being said, it’s not a poor song, depicting a dysfunctional family’s festivities as another year draws to close, but it fails to move with the same gravitas as the best Waits closers—“That Feel,” “Come on up to the House,” and “The Day After Tomorrow.” This boils down to personal taste, but bonus song “Tell Me”—with its pondering of the mundane and spaghetti western guitar lines—would have been a more suitable and rewarding capstone.

All told, the album straddles that delicate line of breaking new ground while acknowledging the past, making it Waits’s most accessible album in more than a decade.

- Cole Waterman

Star Fucking Hipsters
From The Dumpster To The Grave
Fat Wreck Chords
2/10

Oh, shut up. “From the Dumpster To The Grave?” REALLY? You would think that after a few decades, the socially-conscious arm of the punk movement would have something new to offer. But, I guess we’re stuck with the same contrived, cliche bullshit that does nothing to forward any kind of change towards the system that SFH loves to bitch about. Yes, yes, “the system,” “the Vietnam War,” “bitching about Christianity,” I GET IT. At least the riffs are decent, so if you zone out the lyrics, it ain’t THAT bad. Thirteen tracks of fast-paced moaning ska-punk does nothing to instill a sense of passion in me, except maybe to take a shower. Which probably makes me a fucking sell-out.

-Jonathan Yost

Goddamn, reviewing depressing music is depressing, even if it IS really good. Tidelands’ If… is really good. With Gabriel Leis’ droning baritone and a barrage of orchestration, Tidelands weaves tales that are full, if not a bit melancholy, and at times, fairly chaotic. How they got all that to work together is beyond me, but I’m not going to ask too many questions. I WAS gonna try to clean my room while listening to it, but it lends itself to reading a book far more than it does to being productive. Here, take a look/listen: