25. Heavy Cream – Super Treatment (Infinity Cat)

 

A useful concept, this ‘Heavy Cream’. Maybe you could rub it on Traffic records and make them good? Requiring no such rubbing are Heavy Cream themselves, a Nashville trio whose second LP roars into town bearing the sonic footprints of ‘Pussywhipped’ era Bikini Kill - all toxic, compressed guitar tone and hectoring, high register vocals – being coerced into belting out the kind of galumphing, girl group-infused glam stomp that Kim Fowley spent much of the late ‘70s trying to convince us equalled ‘punk rock’. And you know what, maybe he had a point, cos the thunderous Phil-Spector-brutalised-with-rubber-hose hoo-hah of ‘79’ and ‘John Johnny’ still sound pretty grand to me. Thematically similar if rather more visceral and to the point, ‘TV Preachers’ and women-behind-bars epic ‘Prison Shanks’ are vintage Killed By Death derangement, pitched somewhere between hilarious novelty slop like The Child Molesters or whatever, and the more heavy-duty dissatisfaction of Canada’s The Dishrags. Musically I guess we’re veering more toward the latter half of the garage-punk equation here, but with a sense of bodacious drunken fun that very much connects with the former aspect. It’s all good rock n’ roll nonsense anyway, even if Ty Segall’s production job sees distortion and compression pushed to somewhat tedious extremes, in a quest for aural excitement that succeeds only in making the whole venture sound flattened & samey, EQed up to give me a right ear-ache when cranked via ear-phones on the morning stagger to work. A real fun record all the same, and I bet they’d be a blast live.

Moreso than usual, the Barlow tunes sound pretty much like Sebadoh with slightly better guitar (thus earning a ‘meh’ from me), and as for Mascis, well, he’s got his particular ‘thing’ down to a fine art by this stage, so no surprises from that direction either. Normally I’d continue with some generic comment about how an apparently successful, happily married middle-aged man can still manage to conjure up these tumultuous vistas of inarticulate adolescent angst at the drop of a hat, but actually he seems to have mellowed out a little lyrically/emotionally too, sounding at least a BIT less distraught and untogether than he did when he was twenty one, his raging sorrows increasingly filtering through into a kind of rose-tinted wistfulness for chances missed, good times gone, and so forth.

Of course, we don’t really turn up at a Dinosaur record for any of that shit, so let’s get to the point. Though one may blanch when scanning through the mp3s and noting that many of these songs break the five minute barrier, rest assured that many of those superfluous minutes are dedicated to Mascis cutting loose on some characteristically supreme guitar business, and if you’re as much of a fan of unashamed six string grandeur as I am, what more do you need to know? Dude still tears it up like the bastard son of Neil Young and Wayne Kramer wired up to a rig the size of Krakatoa. Hearing him do what he does is a joy at an time of day, and, speaking of Neil, closing track ‘See It On Your Side’ in particular is frrkin’ awesome, catching the band at their Young-est, indulging in a few ‘Cortez the Killer’ riffs for a suitably sublime, greatest hits-worthy fade out.



I wrote about this just a few weeks back, but in case you’ve got a real bad memory here’s some things I said about it:

“Returning to Pollard though, since when did his songwriting get so, well…. linear? As much as I might swear by the mighty poetry of his conventional crossword-fucking lyrical style, even his most hardcore followers would have to admit he’s been driving it to the far edges of pointlessness in recent years, so it’s kinda refreshing to find him striking out with some more deliberately constructed material. In fact almost all of the album’s Pollard “hits” - ‘Hangover Child’, ‘She Lives In An Airport’, ‘White Flag’, ‘The Challenge is Much More’ – take the route of establishing a single lyrical theme and sticking to it, much in the way that a “normal” songwriter might do.
[…]
More to the point though, all of the above-mentioned songs – plus rousing opener ‘King Arthur The Red’ - stand as solid GBV fare, tunes that could have fared well had they appeared in slightly scrappier form on ‘Under the Bushes..’, and if admittedly none of them are exactly *spectacular*, with the addition of Sprout’s songs that still gives ‘Bears For Lunch’ by far the best Pollard/GBV hit rate in recent memory. And speaking of memory, I was worried initially worried that these songs would fade fast from it, but no - having just experienced a weekend wherein earphone time was in short supply, I can confirm that fragments of ‘Challenge..’ and ‘..Airport’ kept scraping away at the back of my brain, demanding attention, achieving precisely the kind of compulsive, scratch-that-itch listenability that indie rock has always traded on and thus clearing the final hurdle toward official, canonical GBV golden glory.
[…]
Whether anything on this album will make any kind of impression on listeners who aren’t already fully paid up GBV freaks is debatable, but, given the slim chances of said listeners even getting to hear it, that’s very much a moot point. Beginners are free to walk proudly into the record shops and ask for directions to the sanctified classics of the sainted ‘90s, but for those of us who have listened to them and listened to them and listened to them again already, ‘Bears For Lunch’ provides another nice disc to add to the heap, finding our heroes in sprightlier form than anyone might have expected, with the slow, sad creep toward obsolescence and death that accompanies disappointing comeback records happily vanquished… for a few months, at least.”

21. G. Green – Crap Culture (Mt St Mtn)