I spent my twenties in bars. And not high-class bars either. No, I exclusively frequented old man bars with glum duffers leaning silently over their drinks and paying no attention to the ancient television sitting atop a tower of beer cases, hole in the wall bars with big glass jars of pickled eggs dating back to the Kennedy Administration, dim dive bars with broken furniture piled in the corners, small town Maryland bars with stickers reading “The KKK is Watching You” in the urinals (for real), and best of all, a bar in a bad neighborhood in North Philly where you had to be buzzed in and which was run by a sullen bullet-headed old man who was guilty of WWII war crimes, I’m certain of it, and who put up signs prohibiting every known form of barroom amusement, including dancing, swearing, sitting on the pool table, spitting, and for all I know laughing. You could have a good time there, if you sat very still and didn’t mention the Nuremburg Trials.
I bring all this up because Providence, Rhode Island’s Deer Tick is responsible for one of the greatest bar room tunes I’ve ever heard. It’s called “Let’s All Go to the Bar,” and it captures precisely the minor league Bukowskian spirit of my younger years. It comes off their 2011 LP Divine Providence, which I like better than its predecessors because it’s raucous and high-spirited, or at least its best songs are.
And that’s no accident. The band wanted to release an LP that captured the “the raw and spontaneous kerosene blaze” of their live shows, and they’ve succeeded, for the most part. The album includes plenty of good time bordering on maybe I ought to go to rehab music, and if that bullet-headed old war criminal’s bar had had a jukebox, “Let’s All Go to the Bar” would have provided the perfect accompaniment to popping pills and drinking shots of cheap tequila. Alas, there was no jukebox. I suspect he was afraid it would tempt people to dance.
Deer Tick has been criticized for sounding a bit too much like the Replacements, and I can hear the resemblance. But if you’re going to steal, steal from the best, and besides, over the course of five LPs John Joseph McCauley (Deer Tick’s guiding light) has written plenty of tunes that no one would mistake for the Mats. Deer Tick was formed in 2007, and went from a revolving cast of musicians to a band with a formal line-up just in time for Divine Providence. In the meantime the band received plenty of critical plaudits and got labeled indie folk, which was what led McCauley and Company to aim for a grittier, more up-tempo sound on Divine Providence. As McCauley put it, the band “just kind of got sick of hearing the words indie-folk and shit like that.”
Anyway, Divine Providence is triumphant in parts and disappointing in others. To be more specific, it has a first half that kicks like a mule on steroids and a second half that lies down like a mule and dies. Unlike Deer Tick’s previous albums, McCauley didn’t write all the tunes, and other band members contributed one dark number about mass murderer/clown John Wayne Gacy, a perky number about walking out the door, and a sweet and sad number about love, which is a bit of a sore point with me right now. I hereby propose a moratorium on love songs, at least for a decade or so. But it won’t happen, because love songs are protected by shadowy players at the dizzying heights of the military-industrial-love song complex, goddamn them.
Superb album opener “The Bump” is a cacophonous mid-tempo stop-and-start number featuring some rasping vocals about perpetual adolescence (“We’re full grown men/But we act like kids”), great group backing vocals, a high-spirited guitar and honky-tonk piano, and even some cool whistling. But it’s McCauley’s sandpaper vocals that win the day, whether he’s indulging in reverse braggadocio (“A night with me/Is gonna mess you up”) about how badass he is or conceding that some day the other shoe will drop (“We’ll face the music/Next time we roll in”). Follow-up “Funny Word” opens with somebody saying “You fuckin’ douche bag” in a fake New Yawk accent and just gets better from there. It’s a big blustering number with a great guitar riff, a locked-in rhythm section, and a bad attitude. As for the funny word of the title it’s love, and the way McCauley sings it you get the distinct idea he means funny bad and not funny good. The tune features a pair of great guitar solos, before McCauley goes out screaming, “I tell you love/Is such a funny word! Funny! Funny!!” And the band throws everything into the cataclysmic ending, including what sounds like a saxophone.
“Let’s All Go to the Bar” is a boozy anthem in the great tradition of boozy anthems, comes out of the gates at punk velocity, and features lots of call and response with McCauley singing a line (e.g., “I don’t care if you’re already drunk”) and the band shouting “Let’s all go to the bar.” McCauley doesn’t give a shit about consequences; he’s dead set on sitting himself down on a bar stool no matter what (“I don’t care if you puke in my ride”), and he obviously convinces his mates because the tune ends with somebody saying “Let’s go get drunk.” Face it: if you don’t find yourself singing along with this salty salute to getting faced you’re either just plain dumb, or worse, a straightedger. It’s in the running for my song of the year, and is everything a good rock song should be—anarchic, devil-may-care, and heedless of the possibility of disaster. Speak of the devil, “Clownin’ Around” is an indie folk tune about Chicago mass murderer John Wayne Gacy, and while the melody is pretty the lyrics are macabre, as in, “I let my houseguests rest in my crawlspace/Don’t let anyone tell you that I’m a bad host/I take cover behind my white face paint/While I battle my bitter father’s ghost.” There’s a nice instrumental passage, then Gacy sings about how it’s his turn to die, at which point the band breaks into a strange carnival-like ending.
“Main Street” is a power pop tune with a great organ and McCauley singing about how he can’t speak because he can’t use his mouth, but sounds too much like a Replacements song for its own good, while “Chevy Express” is a mid-tempo song that goes easy on the guitars and drums but heavy on the atmospherics. The lyrics are oblique, ranging from talk about highway improvements to the lines, “Drugs and terror/Which one’s better/Mother nature’s waging a war.” To be honest I can’t make heads or tails of the lyrics, and it’s kind of depressing, though no so much so it will make you want to off yourself. That’s Nick Drake’s job.
“Something to Brag About” opens with a cacophony over which McCauley sings “Oh say can you see” before erupting into a gale-force rocker that, like “Main Street,” has a bit too much Replacements’ DNA for my liking. That said it’s a most excellent tune, with McCauley screaming about how “Johnny has a bottle of wine” and he’s never going to get to work on time, while the guitarists play prototypical fifties riffs. It may be a trifle derivative, but it’s still a shakin’ good time and the aural equivalent of a snort of good crank.
“Walkin’ Out the Door” is probably my least favorite tune on the LP. It’s pleasant enough, but the melody isn’t all that catchy, the lyrics aren’t that good (beware the baseball metaphor!) and it’s too subdued in general. So I’m walking out the door to the next track, “Make Believe,” which features some drum shuffle and a melody that isn’t all that catchy and is saved only by its fetching chorus. As for the plaintive “Now It’s Your Turn,” it starts as a slow, piano-driven number, and I didn’t like it at first. But it grew on me despite its romantic subject matter, thanks in large part to the thrilling guitar solo that comes from out of nowhere. Throw in some good, albeit vague, lyrics (“But our eyes make bridges burn/ Those nights are all we’ve earned/Well I’m alone/Here’s my heart/Now it’s your turn”) and what you’ve got is a decent, but not great, track.
“Electric” is an organ-driven tune that doesn’t do much for me, probably because it lacks, well, electricity. It’s slow to a fault and I have no idea what McCauley’s singing about, and where the hell are the drummer, bassist, and guitarist anyway, in the john smoking a J? At the Arby’s down the street? Because this enervated tune needs them, unless you like dragging numbers that just bum you out and leave you with nothing but memories of the LP’s earlier and wilder songs. Which leaves us with the 36 minutes and 13 seconds of “Miss K.,” a perky and fetching number that has some Van Morrison and Felice Brothers in it, and which actually lasts just a smidgen over 3 minutes. What follows is a long, long silence, about a half hour of silence in fact, at which point Deer Tick returns to perform some country honk in the form of a cover of Paul Westerberg’s pro-tobacco tune “Mr. Cigarette.” I happen to find the long silence annoying, because I don’t want to wait 30 minutes for anything, and just last night called the Chinese food joint I order delivery from because they failed to show for a half-hour. I know Paul Westerberg is a genius and legend and all that, but he’s not as good as Kung Pao Chicken, so I probably won’t be listening to “Mr. Cigarette” much despite the fact that I’m a smoker who likes to smoke around kids and flick my butts into the gutter even if I’m standing right next to one of those weird three-foot-high cigarette receptacles you see all over the place.
Taken as a whole, Divine Providence starts out like gangbusters and goes downhill from there. The songs I love I really love, but there are far too many songs that leave me simply indifferent. That promised “kerosene blaze” has pretty much gone out by “Something to Brag About,” and I wish they’d opted to keep the tempos fast, at least on a few more numbers. “Let’s Go to the Bar” remains on my short list of favorite songs for the year almost over, and I’m certain I’ll find myself listening to the first half of Divine Providence again. But as for the second half, it’s a bummer, man, and that’s no way for an album to go out. I find myself wishing the latter half of Divine Providence had included a few barnburners like “Mange” off 2010’s Black Dirt Sessions or “Straight into a Storm” off 2009’s Born on Flag Day, but that’s not the way it works. Ya plunk down your money and you get what you get. Which in this case is a fire that goes out before its time, and I hate to see a fire go out, which I guess makes me a pyro or something.
GRADED ON A CURVE:
B
