The Bottle Rockets—Lean Forward—Bloodshot—2009
The Bottle Rockets, the pride of Festus, Missouri, are back with Lean Forward, out August 11th, their first album since 2006’s Zoysia, and their third album on the Bloodshot label. The album also marks the return of producer Eric “Roscoe” Ambel, who helmed 1994’s The Brooklyn Side and 1997’s 24 Hours a Day, and it’s a welcome reunion. Lean Forward sounds just terrific, with clear, sharp production, showing refreshing restraint—Ambel mostly stays out of the way with an unfussy focus on clean lines, allowing the songs to speak for themselves. The Bottle Rockets have long been one of America’s great bar bands, so it’s nice that their new album sounds like four dudes standing in a room playing together. Main dude Brian Henneman’s voice is up front and unaltered, the drums are full of pop, and the guitars are alive and tough.
The cover of Lean Forward is a close-up of an old Fender amp with a mic in the middle of its speaker, presumably ready to blow the doors off of a club near you. It’s an appropriate image, as the band these days has sharpened its twin-guitar attack with slick-picking Johnny Horton, now on his second record with the group, and Henneman, himself a skilled, versatile slinger. (Henneman has been gigging around St. Louis the last couple of years as the lead guitarist in Diesel Island, a classic-country cover band.) The record doesn’t take long to establish itself as a guitar album with the rattling opener, “The Long Way,” with its toggling two-note riff. At the end of the song, three guitars do battle—two of them ride the riff hard over a machine-gun snare drum, while the other squawks and bends on a single fret. It’s lean-and-mean guitar, a sound that the band revisits throughout: on the ’70s-era Stones lick of “Shame On Me,” the distorted Bo Diddley crunch of “Nothin’ But a Driver,” the swamp-funk riff of “Hard Times,” the Clapton-esque solo in “Give Me Room,” and the hard-rock scraunch of “Way It Used to Be.”
The other story here is that Brian Henneman is not only keepin’ on keepin’ on, but he’s one middle-aged rock veteran who continues to tighten his songwriting and lyrical alacrity. Here, the very idea of moving through stages and, especially, dealing with the bumps in the road, is central to these songs, with Henneman celebrating life’s twists but also admitting the latent flight that exists amid the setbacks and pep talks. It’s an album of the current times, to be sure, but with a recurring optimistic, or at least ambiguous, spin.
Take “Hard Times,” a title that evokes the Stephen Foster ballad about the impoverished; it’s indeed about economic struggle, but it articulates the common man’s resolve to endure. “Hard times, that’s nothin’/Hard times pass,” Henneman sings over trash-bucket drums, “Just ’cause I’m short now, doesn’t mean I’m poor.” Or in “Nothin’ But a Driver,” about a chauffeur who sits behind the wheel of luxury cars but is never their owner; instead, his job is to “pick up and deliver—well, that’s good enough for me.” The character goes on to declare that he’s “happy with a wage that might lead you to suicide.” Elsewhere the music provides an ironic counter to the bleakness in the characters’ lives, as in “Done It All,” the sunniest pop song ever written about Seasonal Affective Disorder. Later, on “Slip Away,” the character admits that he’s “runnin’ late, runnin’ behind/I’d like to catch up, but don’t really mind.” Best of all is “The Long Way,” on which Henneman insists that unexpected delays or setbacks can be blessings in disguise: “The long way isn’t the wrong way.” It’s a crafty hook and one that introduces a set that sees its characters pushing through pain because there’s no other choice, or, as the character notes in “Kid Next Door,” “We keep on livin’ as we keep on dyin’.”
“The Long Way” delivers this message through a car metaphor, referencing side trips down Highway 80 and I-35, “singin’ songs and glad to be alive.” In fact, Lean Forward may contain more automobile-as-escape metaphors than any record since Born to Run (and “Nothin’ But a Driver” is a “She’s the One” knockoff, to boot). In “Hard Times,” the character “ain’t broke down…just out of gas.” In “Give Me Room,” the character itches to get away, needing only a “time-tested machine and a tank of gasoline.” In the fiddle-and-mandolin toe-tapper “Get on the Bus,” the character’s girl has his car, forcing him onto public transportation. And on “Kid Next Door,” the speaker remembers his dead friend through the image of the car the boy loved.
“Kid Next Door” is the song that will stick to your ribs. Over a haunting, repetitive line, the song tells the story of a high school football star who used to drive around town blasting hip-hop from his kick-ass car stereo but then one day stood in the narrator’s garage wearing desert camouflage and now will never be coming home again. The narrator goes to a football game and puzzles over the expendability of his friend: “Without his number or his name, people cheering just the same.” Henneman makes no overt war protest here; instead he simply gives voice to the hurt and confusion so many feel—“Was it right or was it wrong? Did it change the bottom line?” Still, there’s no softening the impact of the song’s most direct line: “That kid is forever gone.”
The ache in the lives of the characters is tempered by acceptance, but Henneman also knows that regret is a bitch that is bound to surface now and then. In the midtempo “Shame On Me,” the character resolves to stop lying and wasting time, mostly because he doesn’t want to let his woman down again. Likewise, on “The Way It Used to Be,” a searing rocker, the character has run out of viable options as everything he loves is now part of his past tense. Speaking of love, Henneman has always written great love songs although his adenoidal voice doesn’t lend itself to baladeering, exactly. But Lean Forward contains two winners. “Open Your Eyes” is a slow, acoustic strummer, embroidered by Horton’s tasteful guitar runs, on which the narrator can finally accept that he lives for someone else. Better yet is “Solitaire,” trading the car metaphor for a card-playing one; it’s a moonlit tune, backed by a smidge of electric piano, about the challenges of enduring love.
Whether these songs are about loving, struggling, or escaping, they are all about enduring. And that’s just what the Bottle Rockets prove that they are about here. They predated the ’90s alt-country boom, saw their major-label shot implode, and went through lineup defections and reshuffles. Through it all, Brian Henneman has kept the Rockets in the game, compiling an impressive body of work as one of rock’s most productive and consistent bands. Lean Forward keeps the Rockets’ streak alive and well.
