Golden Smog – Blood On The Slacks

Although playing haphazard cover songs gave Golden Smog its start in the late ’80s — and comprised the entirety of the group’s 1992 debut EP On Golden Smog — the alt-rock collective (including ex-Jayhawks Gary Louris and Marc Perlman, and Soul Asylum’s Dan Murphy) took a more serious tack on sporadic subsequent projects, including last year’s Another Fine Day.

Some of the band’s early cheek resurfaces on its latest, an eight-song “mini-album” with six original tunes and two covers. Golden Smog resurrects a pair of tunes from the sessions for Another Fine Day, showing good-natured exasperation on the jangling rocker “Can’t Even Tie Your Own Shoes” and shrugging dismissively over churning guitars on “Look At You Now”. Things get goofy on the rootsy ballad “Scotch On Ice”, a deadpan homage to a pliable lover who digs “handcuffs and stuff.” Turns out she doesn’t nag because, well, she’s inflatable. The nutty instrumental “Magician” sounds like what might accompany a low-rent conjurer working in a gone-to-seed casino, while the twangy acoustic “Without A Struggle” would have fit on one of the Jayhawks’ early albums.

The cover tunes draw from eclectic influences. Louris turns David Bowie’s “Starman” into a psychedelic country-rock tune that owes more to hippie cowboy Doug Sahm than to 1970s glam-rock. On “Tarpit”, the band strips away Dinosaur Jr.’s distorted guitars and shuddering volume to find a quavering acoustic folk tune.