This little guy became notorious as a member of Sebadoh for writing the songs not written by Lulu Barlow–which meant the ones that normally disrupted the flow of an otherwise good album. But by the time of the group’s last good album, Bakesale, in ’94, he was finally learning how to come up with a decent effort once in a while. "Not Too Amused," for instance, was a great slacker-angst anthem where you could feel the skin, as well as guitar strings, bristle.
As drummer of that ultimate indie outfit, Loewenstein always had hip credence up the anus–now with the parent group apparently on hiatus while Barlow works out his movie deals and all that (and possibly his own reality-based tv series), Loewenstein has come up with his first solo outing. Naturally, it’s on Sub Pop, the label that gave it all to you in the first place.
It ain’t bad. Playing all the instruments himself, Loewenstein is totally responsible for whether this album succeeds, and occasionally it does, although this poor sod has spent so much time as Barlow’s understudy that he sometimes sounds downright schizo. Like Lou and a lot of those indie cats, he apparently thinks it’s cool to fool around with a lot of minor chords. He favors open-chord tuning (it’s easy to play), which is always a plus (Keith Richards being the prime example of an open-tuned maestro).
But the music doesn’t exactly jump–listen to the ironically titled "Roswell to Jerusalem" and tell me, is the guy being straight with us? The chords are oppressively ill-timed, almost to the point of being off-key, as is the singing. Meanwhile, you can’t understand the words because he sings them in a weirdly lilting falsetto. It’s downright ginchy, and you gotta wonder once again if he’s putting us on. His voice gets almost slippery at one point, like he swallowed a goldfish, but it was probably just sushi or maybe even his guitar pick. In any case, he should have stopped singing at that point and consulted a physician.
In the presskit it says that Loewenstein is a big Captain Beefheart fan, which is never a good thing. The good news is, Loewenstein hardly sounds like the Captain at all–in fact, on cuts like "NYC III" and "Casserole" he sounds a lot like Lou Barlow. The latter is probably the best cut on the album, a punchy rave-up that sounds like Sebadoh with a nice little Western guitar motif thrown in, and a few icy triangular prisms. Pretty damn impressive considering that Loewenstein’s playing all the instruments.
For a One Man Band he don’t pillage much–but some of the stuff he does pillage includes the riff from Rebecca Odes’ "Bottomfeeder," which gets reincarnated as the intro to "Codes" before the song swings into a little Joy Division. Once this opus gets going, it’s an intense dive-bombing rocker of an almost Figgs quality–considering that it’s all done with overdubs, it ain’t too shabby.
"H/M" has kind of a Blue Cheer intro before swinging into a mock-metallic holocaust. Could that be why it’s entitled "H/M"? ("Heavy Metal"?) This plays to the "ironic" conceit of indie rock–the implications of this song, which is an instrumental, are that if a person grew up listening to indie rock in the 80s he was actually hipper than a person who grew up listening to heavy metal. Such recent phenomena as Chuck Klosterman’s Fargo Rock City, as well as the success of the Osbournes’ tv show, may ultimately disprove this theory.
As far as song titles go, the one that really jumps out at you is "More Drugs"–is this another smarmy joke or are we really gonna get the goods this time? Don’t get your hopes up–far from being an expositional treatise on the joys (or horrors) of ingesting, it’s another tunelessly oblique catastrophe.
"Transform" ends the album with another Sebadoh soundalike–which is good, because at this point we all need a reminder of who this guy is (was?). Gotta love him.
