As soon as you hear the crunchy power chords of this album's opening title track, you know Saturday night isn't the only thing Robbie Fulks wants to kill. Like Wilco on Being There, Fulks wants to off our expectations too. So Let's Kill Saturday Night, Fulks' major-label debut and his best album to date, rarely sounds like the traditional country music we've come to associate with him.
Unexpectedly, the initial effect of this new sonic approach is to detract attention from what Fulks is best known for: his lyrics. With his voice regularly surrounded here by twisted or jangling electric guitars and thundering drums, Fulks' words aren't as unavoidable, and don't invite such close inspection, as they did on his earlier Bloodshot Records releases.
That's interesting because, while Fulks is an unerring composer of catchy melodies and a frequently brilliant lyricist, one of his primary weaknesses in the past has been the inconsistency of his words. On last year's South Mouth, for each pair of haunting story songs such as "Cold Statesville Ground" and "South Richmond Girl", there was a moment of pure drivel like "Dirty-Mouthed Flo". And standing shoulder-to-shoulder with undeniable instances of heartwrenching beauty -- the painfully gripping "I Was Just Leaving" or the Nashville Sound-ing "Forgotten But Not Gone", both of which sounded like instant classics -- you could find an insipid throwaway such as "Goodbye Good-Lookin'", which was exactly the sort of dime-a-dozen, "dumb-ass song" Fulks disses in his anti-Nashville diatribe, "Fuck This Town", an infuriating, perplexing composition in its own right. Were we supposed to cheer that song's offhand slams against feminism and gays, or were we supposed to see these bigotries as evidence that the song's narrator -- who's only pissed because his own publishing deal has been unfruitful -- is not to be trusted any further than he could be thrown?
Apparently, Fulks' live performances can sometimes be untrustworthy as well. The one time I saw him, he played emotional chicken with himself, and lost. After delivering one sad and gorgeous ballad, he proceeded to immediately yank the rug from under it by making a big "I don't mean it" show of wiping away crocodile tears -- a gesture that only served to remind that Fulks has occasionally been plagued by irony (his Trailer Trash Review) and emotional distance ("She Took A Lot Of Pills") throughout his career.
On his new album, though, these problems are solved, mainly. Let's Kill Sataurday Night features Fulks' most consistent writing, and a few of his finest compositions yet. But it's the sound that immediately overwhelms. The title track could've been a country song -- it begins with Fulks declaring "Every dollar I make is a buck I owe" -- but with electric guitars screaming all around him, the song becomes a particularly desperate rock anthem of weekend escape; it's Rockpile on speed. Later, on the sweet but distorted "Caroline" (the best Matthew Sweet song that Matthew Sweet never wrote) and the bubblegummy "She Must Think I Like Poetry" (pure power-pop along the lines of the Odds and Adam Schmitt), Fulks creates pop-based rock 'n' roll that's nothing short of exhilarating.
There's a couple of more solid pop-rockers here ("Take Me To The Paradise" and "Down In Her Arms"), but this isn't only a pop-rock release. "Bethelridge" is an atmospheric tape-loop track that owes as much to a monk's chant as it does to Irish keens or hill-country ballads, and the catchy chorus of "Little King" is backed by a blistering guitar attack that verges on Southern rock.
And, buried near the end, there's even some country numbers. "Can't Win For Losing You", for example, rides the stinging pedal steel of Nashville legend John Hughey and is one of Fulks' finest twang performances to date. Less successful is "God Isn't Real", a Louvins-inspired cut that sounds high and lonesome all right, but leaves you wondering, once again, what to make of its narrator. Is a line like "Go ask a child with cancer who eases her pain" supposed to be a sophisticated argument, or is it intended to be taken as the junior-high level theology it really is? I distrust it.
On two more cuts, though, there's no mistaking that Fulks is at the top of his game. Soulful and organ-filled and sensuous as all hell, "Pretty Little Poison", a duet with Lucinda Williams, serves as a remarkable companion piece to Williams' own "Right In Time" -- this is what'd be happening if her lover were there.
And "Night Accident" is one for the ages. With portentous guitar moans and a bare rhythm that pulses as painfully as a guilty conscience and as inevitably as a train moving down a long, slow grade, the song recounts a story of betrayal and revenge that may well be as harrowing as any ever written.
I fear if I saw Fulks do it live, he'd murder it with some wisecrack or goofy mugging. But on Let's Kill Saturday Night, it makes the hair stand up on my neck. And that's a response I always trust.
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