Jean Caffeine’s second solo disc since dissolving the All Night Truckstop some years back finds the Austin singer-songwriter moving further away from the cool-kitsch and nouveau-country stylings of her past, and delving unflinchingly into mature, caustic, hard-boiled songcraft.
Where her 1997 disc Knocked Down 7 Times Got Up 8 bitterly mused on the verities of relationships and love, Idee Fixe zooms straight into the heart of darkness, using those same broken relationships for a starting point but ultimately aiming its focus on larger philosophical matters: desire, obsession, guilt, confusion, self-discovery, anger. All these things bubble up through the first eight tracks and lead inevitably toward “Guilt” (“I never stole from the rich/I never gave to the poor”) and “Kiss My Wound”, both of which are a sort of purging, a pouring out of everything that preceded them.
It’s a messy, emotionally charged brew that in itself would make for a great album, but Idee Fixe is also Caffeine’s return to pure rock ‘n’ roll, heading out toward claustrophobic yet searingly rocking textures. The momentum of Lee Jay Pascal’s electric guitar pushes the songs away from simple folk structures and closer to a dense, jagged, hard rock sound that’s particularly effective on the title track and “I’m Not Your Girlfriend”, with Caffeine’s sneering, pissed off mood permeating every groove.
The only real relief resides in the relative optimism of a rollicking cover of Jon Dee Graham’s “Big Sweet Life”, and the album’s one country-folk nod, “Hand Of Country”, which fits in nicely before the heavier, album-closing pieces, a relative calm before the storm.