Never, and I mean never, have I read a musician describe her work as brilliantly as Elizabeth Nelson, who leads the band The Paranoid Style, does hers. After speaking of her “songs of decorous fury and defiant defeatism,” she describes them as “glam rock for the end times, a Bolan for the abyss.” And sums up her 2015 EP “Rock & Roll Just Can’t Recall” as “fifteen minutes of unadulterated, malevolent mirth and singularly nasty, catchy and precisely unvarnished songcraft.” Why, the nastiness is right there in the title of the EP, a not very subtle dig at the senility of the Depends Generation of classic rock in general and Bob Seger, who gave us the loathsome “Rock & Roll Never Forgets,” in particular.
Nelson’s list of enemies is long but she’s not paranoid, despite the name of her band, which she swiped from an influential essay on the conspiracy-mongering nutball tendencies in American politics written by Richard Hofstadter in 1964. She shares with yours truly contempt for the idealism of the 1960s, the stench of our political system (where’s H.L. Mencken when you need him?) and various other bugbears, such as gurus of all stripes. Oh, and we both love Rod Stewart, who Nelson name drops (“But what do we do with Rod the Mod?”) in the title track.
And the beautiful thing about The Paranoid Style, besides the ingeniousness of the lyrics, is that they rock as hard and produce melodies every bit as fetching as any band this side of the Firth of Forth. In short they do it all, and they do it all for you. Nelson’s band includes such crack musicians as guitarist Bruce Bennett of legendary garage rockers the A-Bones and Will Rigby of the great dBs on drums.
To really comprehend the depth of Nelson’s gimlet-eyed take on American life, you have to go back to “The Dear Departed,” from the 2013 EP “The Purposes of Music in General.” There she tips her hat to the guy who gave her band its name (“Hofstadter said we’ve got a paranoid style/And I like style”) before describing the current dystopia and attacking the Baby Boomers (“The Woodstock nation, the fucking bores/Robbed the coffins, nailed shut the doors”) she sees as a confederacy of hypocritical dunces.
And speaking of the paranoid style—which Hofstadter described, more or less, as a tendency to see insidious conspiracies everywhere—”Rock and Roll Just Can’t Recall” opens with a song about a real conspiracy theory, namely the deep-seated belief of certain persons that invisible and nefarious forces in the U.S. government are trying to enact a blue law that would make Sunday a day of national rest and worship. “National Sunday Law” is a raging and roaring rocker in which Nelson spits vitriol, singing, “I recall National Sunday law/I’m appalled—National Sunday indifference.” While Bennett’s guitar snarls Nelson opens the song with the great lines, “Betcha someone told you you’re a tad unreasonable/Round about the times you had your rivals shot.” As for Bennett’s solo it’s a thing of beauty, as are Nelson’s arcane lyrics (“Kelsey had a healthy interest in prosthetics/You certainly couldn’t say that she was ever bored”).
“New Age Tricks” is a slower but no less excellent piece of songcraft, what its great intro, lovely melody, and burly guitar riff. Meanwhile Nelson attacks every nutty idealist who ever talked imbeciles into believing they could see through the navels, opening the song by singing, “Oh consensus, publicists and your mother/The explorers got it wrong, there ain’t nothing to discover/You can show me the door but I ain’t leaving/I got new age tricks just beyond believing.” She closes the song by singing, “Those new age tricks couldn’t even save you now,” and if the lyrics in between are inscrutable the bile dripping from them is patently obvious.
“Bound to Be Vacant” is a real live raver, roaring like a BMW stolen by the Baader-Meinhof gang speeding down the Autobahn. Bennett’s guitar work—and I’m especially talking about his solo—surpasseth human ken, while Nelson’s lyrics are cold dead brilliant. “I’ll never forget,” she sings, “The last day that we met/You gave me a blindfold and a cigarette,” but what’s really great is the way she superglues a couple of famous Dylan lyrics together: “But don’t think twice—It’s all over now.” Oh, and the way she also manages to interject Johnny Rotten’s “No future” into the mix, making the title a Dylan/Sex Pistols pastiche as she sings, “And babe it’s all over now” followed by the band singing, “No future.” My admiration knows no bounds, brothers and sisters.
The title track isn’t as raucous as its predecessor, but it shows off Nelson’s vocals and ingenious word play. Like “New Age Tricks” it’s an attack song in the great Dylan tradition, with Bennett soloing in the great Robbie Robertson tradition and Nelson tossing off lethal one-liners like, “So you can fuck on water—That don’t make you a miracle man.” (So maybe she’s channeling Elvis Costello on that one, and not Zimmerman. Fucking sue me.) A withering assault on wheelchair rock, it features Nelson sniffing, “You don’t look so good yourself/Maybe you’ve still got the moves and the hooks but you ain’t got the health,” and then following that up with, “Drop the needle and ramble on/’Cuz rock and roll just can’t recall/Rock and roll just can’t recall.”
The EP clincher is a dandy cover of ’60s South African folk rock ensemble Four Jacks and a Jill’s 1967 hit, “Master Jack.” Another song about the wisdom of distrusting wise men, the song opens with some great echoing guitar, then proceeds at a cranked-up but stately pace (the guitar riff is monstrous!) as Nelson comes in to sing, “It’s a strange, strange world that we live in, Master Jack/You taught me all I know and I’m never looking back.” The melody is lovely, and the lyrics constitute a very polite brush-off; they can be summarized as a rephrasing of Dylan’s “Don’t follow leaders/Watch the parking meters.” The singer has seen through her guru, and knows it’s time to move on, and the mood is simultaneously elegiac and liberating. I should add that Nelson has an impeccable taste in covers; her take on Belle and Sebastian’s “Like Dylan in the Movies” off 2013’s “The Purposes of Music in General” does twee proud, and even gives it Charles Atlas muscles thanks to its rapturously rancorous guitar solo.
The mad American poet Delmore Schwartz famously said, “Even paranoids have real enemies.” But I love Nelson and her band, paranoid or not. I expect great things of The Paranoid Style, because they have it all. They’re a thinking person’s rock band that never fails to set Nelson’s ingenious and humorous musings to great melodies, and then to jack up the volume to remind you that what you’re hearing is good old-fashioned explosive hard rock, in the vein of Sleater-Kinney only with better lyrics. I’m as paranoid as the next guy; for example, I believe the Reagan administration funneled super-secret slush money to the bone-headed straightedgers of the early ’80s to further their war on drugs. Okay, so I don’t believe that. Or not really. Or perhaps I should just say I’m on the prowl for evidence. That said, I know I’m not being paranoid when I say, “Buy this EP!”
GRADED ON A CURVE:
A
