Couldawouldashoulda: March 2011

Hey guys. Here’s the first of a series of segments I want to do for Check Your Mode. When we see the lists of the top 20 or 50 albums of a given year, we may also see something called the “Honorable Mentions” section, a place to note albums that were great, but not quite great enough to make it to the final cut. Seeing that I had quite a few “couldawouldashoulda”’s in my greatest fifty albums list last year, (about fifty more to be exact), I decided to have a monthly showcase of five albums that just barely fell out of the running for being in my top fifty albums of the year. Of course, initially, the Couldawouldashoulda’s will not be particularly good, but, as we near the end of the year, my guess is you’ll see some pretty contended releases pop up in this section, of which, of course, there may be plenty of debate.

In No Particular Order…

Amplifier – The Octopus

Original Review Here

The sophomore release from this British prog rock group is nothing if not ambitious. At nearly two hours, The Octopus has a vague concept involving the eponymous cephalopod and houses songs that frequently exceed the 8-minute mark. However, its songs are not loaded with the superfluous genre experiments and masturbatory guitar solos that one has come to expect from albums like these. In fact, the songs of The Octopus are surprisingly straightforward and tempered. But, alas, a ten-minute piano ballad is still a ten-minute piano ballad, and it isn’t long before the album begins to seriously sag. On a track-by-track basis, The Octopus is bearable, but as a dense whole, it’s far too much waiting for very little payoff. While not quite on the same dreadful level of Judas Priest’s concept album, Nostradamus, The Octopus does very little favors in digesting an album that is both too long and too boring; one of the most potently disparaging combinations in music.

Wanda Jackson – The Party Ain’t Over

Original Review Here

Anyone expecting another Van Lear Rose was sorely disappointed. Hell, anyone expecting another Consolers of the Lonely was disappointed. Jack White’s 2011 musical clock-in was an unfortunate musical accommodation for a singer who, admittedly, did not have much of a strong voice to begin with. Amidst White’s trademark fuzz and a rather intrusive horn section, Wanda Jackson sounds uncomfortable throughout The Party Ain’t Over, awkwardly shuffling through the blues (“Thunder on the Mountain”), bosa nova (“Rum and Coca-Cola”) and Amy Whinehouse covers (“You Know I’m No Good”). This isn’t the worst thing that White’s put his name to (The Stripes’ tactless genre stretch, Get Behind Me Satan, is a tad worse), but it’s a genuine surprise to see someone as talented as he finding so many ways to tamper with an album that could have been pretty good despite its innate weaknesses.

Minks – By the Hedge

Original Review Here

As background music, it’s pretty innocuous, but when closely inspected… it’s still pretty innocuous. Which I guess is fine, but I don’t know about you guys, but I don’t have the time to listen to the kind of nebulous shoegaze that I could find in the records of far more talented bands. Sure nothing on By the Hedge is outright offensive and “Indian Ocean” is a very pretty instrumental, but I’m seeing the forest for the trees here and all I’m seeing are the sprouts of what could be passable shrubberies.

Rise Against – Endgame

Original Review Here

This is an unfortunate way to break this to all you Rise Against fans out there, because my review for this album has yet to be posted, but Endgame, the sixth album from Illinois punks Rise Against, is the band’s worst. The good news, though, is there is a reason for this, and it is for lack of trying. When Rise Against experiments, at least something good comes out of it (the good tracks from The Unraveling and Siren Song of the Counterculture), but Endgame finds the group treading some serious water, trying to scrap up the remnants of the near-perfect Appeal to Reason and coming up with something crass and uninspired. Rise Against sound rudderless on the album, something that I can imagine would be incumbent upon a band coming off two fantastic releases. I just hope the group can shape up for the new decade, because their type of firebrand punk rock is still a necessity in these increasingly trying times.

Social Distortion – Hard Times and Nursery Rhymes

Original Review Here

And speaking of underwhelming punk stalwarts, what was Social Distortion doing in the seven years since they released an album? By the sound of Hard Times and Nursery Rhymes, it was a steady diet of lollipops, rainbows and Teletubbies reruns, because Social Distortion sound downright peppy on their newest release. A choir? Optimism? Last time I checked, I was a lazy, smelly, unemployable loser with nothing to hope for but a pair of jeans and a beer when I’m twenty-one, not the fucking light of the Earth Mike Ness pretends to purport me to be. Although, overall, pretty decent, Hard Times and Nursery Rhymes is a startling turn for a group that laid such a large claim to making passive rebellion sound genuine.

Couldawouldashoulda: March 2011

Social Distortion - Hard Times and Nursery Rhymes: B

"Road Zombie"

By far, the best song on Hard Times and Nursery Rhymes is the album’s first track, “Road Zombie”. Not even two and a half minutes long, it is a propulsive and sexy instrumental consisting of simple but brilliant guitar progressions layered over almost metallic chugging reminiscent of the turn Pennywise made on their most recent album, Reason to Believe. It’s an opening track that completely raises the stakes for what fans and newcomers alike may have thought Social Distortion was capable of, more than thirty years in the game and still able to pull out some new tricks.

The other ten tracks that make up Hard Times and Nursery Rhymes, the band’s seventh album, sound nothing like “Road Zombie”, so much so that I will find myself questioning whether or not it’s the same band that transitions from that lead-off to “California (Hustle and Flow)” when I listen to it. To the band’s credit, those other ten tracks sound a lot more like traditional Social Distortion. The only difference in the approach this time around is that they’re embracing their soul and gospel influences, genres whose connections are relevant to the band’s style as far as the blues are one of their major influences. So, they’ve added a choir and some organ, and, in an unwillingness to let these new elements go to waste, the band features that aspect of their sound more prominently, simultaneously distancing themselves from the punk rock that made them worth noting in he mid-80’s.

With this new style comes a new optimism that Hard Times conveys from the playing style to the lyrics. “Life gets hard / And then it gets good,” Mike Ness sings in a croak nearly identical to the one he had in ’83. “Just like I always knew it would.” That lyric perplexed me the first time I heard it. Can you imagine Ness telling that to the protagonist of “Story of My Life”, a rudderless youth who won’t even interview for a job from the shame he feels for his ragged jeans? It’s strange that, in Hard Times and Nursery Rhymes, Social D suddenly pretend that the group’s aesthetic had some kind of silver lining, especially considering the group was at the forefront of the transition in modern punk from outright rebellion to collective lamentation.

That isn’t to say that Social Distortion aren’t allowed to be optimistic at times or play anything other than SoCal strut. If anything, like Lemmy has insisted that Motorhead is a rock and roll band, Social Distortion have never pretended not to be heavily influenced by the sounds that are so pronounced on Hard Times. The thing is, the album’s optimism is so heavy and matter-of-fact, it often comes off as stale. When you make an artificial confectionary sugar pun as one of your song titles, you’re almost asking to have your sincerity questioned, and I’m sorry to inform that this is a significant problem with Hard Times. “Gimme the Sweet and Lowdown” sounds like a Green Day rip-off and “Bakersfield”, with its spoken-word breakdown, sounds exactly like a Peter Wolf B-side. However, where Wolf is able to counteract the kitsch with self-referential winks and nods, Social Distortion remain stubbornly and characteristically humorless throughout Hard Times and Nursery Rhymes, allowing boredom to overtake the listener rather easily.

Hard Times does have some bright spots, as in the avant-punk swing of “Alone and Forsaken”, the gospel throttle of “Can’t Take It With You”, and “Still Alive”, the album’s final track, but it’s hard to come out of the album with a sense that the band isn’t just barely bobbing above the tide of adequacy. My suggestion is to get “Road Zombie”, because that song is quite good despite its brevity, and use your imagination to suggest how Hard Times could have sounded if Social D had followed that initial instinct.

Social Distortion - Hard Times and Nursery Rhymes: B