Bottle Rockets – Brand New Year
People stood in line to see Jeff Beck at South by Southwest this year. Maybe that should have been a sign. The next night, the Bottle Rockets took the stage in full Motorhead mode and tore off a 45-minute set of new songs.
Not the same as the old songs.
Brian Henneman’s been doing a lot of co-writing (Dan Baird, producer Eric Ambel, new bassist Scott Taylor), and he’s learned some new song structures. Well, they’re old structures, but mostly that’s what songs are, old structures with more or less new words, at least these days.
Anyway, they’re anthems, really. Not stories, rarely character studies, certainly not blue-collar vignettes designed to make white-collar critics bow before Henneman’s autodidactic aptitude as a poet.
These are rock songs. There’s a full-fledged guitar solo midway through “Helpless” that runs on far more bars than post-punk modesty would dictate, and quite happily quotes some Skynyrd trope, threatening to choke off a couple times but just rumbling on.
Rock anthems. Pissed-off rock anthems. Pissing on rocks at the side of the road anthems.
Part of me still twitches to that instinct, impaled on the logic of volume and the passionate certainty that tomorrow will be no better than today, and probably worse.
But it’s a smaller part than it used to be, and it’s hard for the Bottle Rockets to take me there as willingly as I went a decade ago. Which only means that my life has made nice for awhile and no record labels have dropped my ass, and pretty much every label the Rockets have signed with has dumped theirs, corncob and all.
For most of their three-plus albums the Bottle Rockets have played (comparatively) subtle in the studio, then avalanched their songs on tour with likker and sleepless fury and every kind of volume discount they could manage. Kind of perfect far away, that, Friday night still being most appropriate to the public exorcism of private demons. Time enough to worship Henneman’s carefully constructed portraits on Sunday afternoon.
Brand New Year skips the preliminaries, paints over the portraits. It’s brutally blunt, and whatever humor remains is dark — witness song titles that read “I’ve Been Dying”, “Headed For The Ditch”, “Helpless”, and “Dead Dog Memories”.
OK, they haven’t completely lost their sense of humor: There’s “The Bar’s On Fire” (the next line is “Somebody save the beer”), a Black Oak Arkansas homage just waiting to be linked to the V-Roys’ “Cold Beer Hello” on somebody’s radio show. Still, Brand New Year is hardly the kind of record to make a middle-aged fella with too many books champion Henneman as a working-class poet. It may be the first overture in their return to classic rock. It may be the mood of the moment, or the reincarnation of a band, or the first sign of slow decline.
Of course the Bottle Rockets have always been more than foils for Brian Henneman, convenient though it is to make of the lead singer the band’s auteur. Their songs have always come from a circle of friends and ex-bandmates, and Henneman’s fresh co-writes merely broaden that circle slightly.
Eric Ambel’s production is crisp and sure. Henneman’s guitar work is increasingly adroit, and his vocals (especially on Robert Parr’s wry list-song, “Sometimes Found”) are rich and confident. Hell, the whole band’s tighter than rusted lug nuts on a flat tire. And driving around, using the stereo to block out the traffic jam, that’s kinda fun.
But previous releases have given reason to expect more. It’s hard not to hear the band’s deep and abiding frustration throughout Brand New Year, what with the grim “Gotta Get Up” (a workaday ’90s update to the ennui of a legendary Fugs song from the ’60s that I’ve never actually heard) and the biting “White Boy Blues” (about a guitar-playing lawyer). In the end, that bleakness overwhelms the album.
Grim and biting they have been before; “Kerosene” and “Welfare Music” are songs for the ages. But this seems like rage without hope, without joy, and there is little pleasure in it.