Music
Fifth album from Austinite brings more than a little love Michael Corcoran Austin American-Statesman There's the blurred-fast right-hand strum, the absurdist worldview delivered with the pierce of righteousness. There's the sardonic lines and the distillation of twin electric guitars into a single acoustic. This machine doesn't kill fascists, it traps them with cupped hands, takes them outside and sets them free. It was 10 years ago that a middle-aged bald man from upstate New York moved to Austin and won our hearts with a fierce and comical one-man-punk-rock-army routine at the late, lamented Electric Lounge. But nothing we know about Ed Hamell prepares us for just how compelling, how satisfying, how fist-stirring and soul-leaping is his fifth album. Oh, there can be such beauty in rediscovery. "Tough Love" has five or six songs that you'll play over and over before making it through the entire album the first time. There are songs like "All That Was Said," a duet with his label boss Ani DiFranco, that will provide a soundtrack to those crazy dreams you have when you're half awake and half asleep. There are garage love songs, like "Everything and Nothing," where hip-shaking guitar lines only heighten the theme that love is a groove, man. A hook-heavy knock at Rolling Stone magazine and crass commercialism is followed by a tender ode to hate crime victim Matthew Shepard. This album is like a great conversationalist with a gift for melody. "What part of `Thou shall not kill' don't you understand?" Hamell posits nasally in the leadoff track "Don't Kill" and the wry guy we remember returns. It's only a cameo, however, and Hamell and company get back to the business of spraying the air with thick, Queens of the Stone Age-worthy groove. Once a gimmick -- a solo artist with a band name -- Hamell On Trial becomes a true band in the album's first minute, when the bass and drums kick in to elevate "Don't Kill." This is a rock 'n' roll record, without all the corniness the tag implies. If Hamell were a young cute mop-top in a pair of designer-dirty jeans, he'd be the new White Strokes. Can the guy help it if he it it looks like he strayed from his Mummenschanz troupe? "I wear a Marshall stack for a necktie," he sings in homage to Bo Diddley on "Oughta Go Around," a track that just shreds anything else out there. You'd forget that Hamell was in a nasty car crash in May 2000 and almost died if he didn't sing about it on "Downs." But Hamell's not going to write a near-death experience song, he's gonna focus on the giddiness of being in the hospital and getting high for the first time in 12 years. "I can not lie/I dig that high/Havin' a ball with the Demerol," he sings as the eerie rhythms echo the strange sense of attachment. Hamell possesses a chameleon- like ability to sound like several different singers on "Tough Love." For the power pop numbers like "First Date" he smooths his vocals to match the singsong melodies. He snarls like a punk rocker on "Worry Wart," gets broke down in a Tom Waits way on the title track and drips with vulnerability on "Detroit Lullabye." Then, on "There Is a God," he struts like a classic riff rocker. That Ed Hamell accomplishes this genre-jumping without an air of self-consciousness is impressive, indeed. This record may not make SoundScan flutter, but it passes the lie detector test. All right, the elementary rhyming exercise of "Dear Pete" is that "one song too many" and maybe, just maybe, there's a little too much knee-jerk corporate-bashing in the air. But this is a record that wants to be played over and over -- a noble design within a culture where records sound like they just want to be sold over and over. See how repeated listens to the new Hamell have me thinking? | |||||
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