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Sharp
as Nails
Lucky
Pierre
ThinKing
(Lucky Pierre Music)
Lucky Pierre, Prick’s nicer face, surfaces hard and brilliant
two years after Prick’s The Wreckard, Kevin McMahon’s
jagged, tormented return to form. Pierre and Prick live in
McMahon’s head, expressing different parts of a personality
that is tangled, indeed. Fame burned McMahon in the ‘90s,
when he recorded as Prick for Trent Reznor’s Nothing label
and toured with the Nine Inch Nailhead and David Bowie. Lucky
Pierre was his band in the ‘70s and ‘80s; Reznor—and Tom Lash,
McMahon’s key supporter—is a graduate. Lucky Pierre never
dies, he embers—and occasionally bursts into flame, like here.
ThinKing is a very fine, very edgy pop record. It’s
also Lucky Pierre’s first CD.
The 11 tracks on ThinKing, largely recorded by McMahon
in his apartment in suburban Cleveland, are exemplary pop-rock,
from the eerie, metallically sensual “Clouds” to “Attitude,”
a twisted power ballad about the perils of domesticity and
curdled Catholicism, two of McMahon’s most inspiring obsessions.
McMahon’s music is insidious and infernally catchy; tunes
like “Sidewalking,” razorblade rockabilly with a bass line
from Eddie Cochran’s “C’mon Everybody,” is about blacking
out from booze, and “Saint of Blue,” a harlequin folk tune
that shifts gears and dynamics with ease to showcase Lucky
Pierre’s more pastoral side, hold your inner ear captive.
Where The Wreckard was wildly experimental and abrasive,
ThinKing is more accessible. Some tunes date to what
would have been Prick’s follow-up album for Nothing, a project
scuttled in the late ’90s; some seem much more recent, like
“Beginning,” McMahon’s disavowal of the inner darkness that
is his muse—and has often consumed him.
Various friends help here, like former Exotic Bird Andy Kubiszewski,
on occasional drums; Garrett Hammond, sometime drummer and
frequent engineer; and Warne Livesey, who produced the first
Prick album. McMahon, however, is the force here, and he’s
equally good at lyrics and music. Packed with quadruple entendres,
fractured French and cleverly masked accounts of truly painful
events, ThinKing reminds you how expressive pop can
be—and how very hard it can rock. (For ordering information,
some lyrics and some MP3s, go to www.luckypierremusic.com.)
—Carlo
Wolff
 Auf
der Maur
Auf
der Maur (Capitol)
Alternative radio stinks. That’s a foregone conclusion, a
given, a straw-man discussion (especially since commercial
radio in general stinks). So this piece is not going
to be yet another entry in the let’s-see-who-can-piss-on-it-in-the-most-clever-arc
sweepstakes that has become a lot of rock writing. Rather,
let’s point to the signs of life: Of the songs on heavy rotation,
Loretta Lynn (you heard me) and Jack White have the coolest
(“Portland, Oregon”—isn’t that a pisser?), and Modest Mouse,
the Killers and Franz Ferdinand have likeable, if not wheel-reinventing,
singles. (Meanwhile, the once unassailable Wilco have chimed
in with the exceedingly boring “Handshake Drugs,” from an
album that draws a complete blank.)
But for every Modest Mouse and Loretta Lynn, there’s a Dashboard
Confessional (the ridiculously inflated dynamics of “Vindicated”),
an Apollo Sunshine (Ben Folds should never be an influence
on anyone—ever) and, more to our point, a Melissa Auf der
Maur, whose status as onetime replacement bassist in Hole
and Smashing Pumpkins somehow inorganically evolved into a
solo deal with Capitol Records. And despite her pedigree,
Auf der Maur [pr: OWF-der-MAO-er] has taken the alt-metal-lite
path to airplay, her image a conflation of raven-haired sex
kitten and doom-singing alt-metal goddess. (What Lita Ford
was to ’80s metal, Auf der Maur is to alt-metal. Check out
the inlay pics of her flailing around and posing with her
bass guitar in high-heeled boots and bodice.)
As for the songs, the popular single “Followed the Waves”
comes off like A Perfect Circle without the art-rock aspect,
its radio infectiousness dependant upon some ominously chiming
guitar tones from Queens of the Stone Age’s Josh Homme and
a sinuous, über-serious chorus. True story: Hearing
the banshee wail that kicks off the track for the first time,
I was unprepared for its comic impact and sprayed the computer
screen with Diet Coke. (The rest of the song seemed to chastise
me for my mirth: “This is serious business, Mister,” it seemed
to say. “Life is serious and dark, and you better straighten
up.”)
On the opener “Lightning Is My Girl,” Auf der Maur harshly
whispers the title line over skittering metal tones by way
of introduction. However, once again, the singer lands comically
wide of her flinty, suggestive intentions and then hurls headlong
into an obtuse exploration of ’90s alt-metal clichés and goofy,
nonsensical wordplay (“Gonna let the lightning tuck me into
my bed/Electrified and cherry red”). The death knell for any
credibility comes with “Taste You” (“I can’t fake it my love/I
need filling, come on/I need it louder than bombs” or “I’ve
got a big mouth/I will taste you”). Mark Lanegan, one of many
big names on board to help out Auf der Maur, mutters a guest
vocal at song’s end like he’s trying not to be noticed.
—Erik
Hage
 Arto
Lindsay
Salt
(Righteous Babe)
Arto Lindsay’s third album for the Righteous Babe label (and
sixth overall), again sports a one-word title (its predecessors
being Prize and Invoke). Salt can be
a noun, adjective or verb, as can the equally succinct Prize,
whereas, the two-syllable Invoke act only as a verb.
Those are small and easy-to-miss details, worth mentioning
only because Lindsay’s music is rich with similarly scaled
characteristics. He continues to explore Brazilian musical
traditions, braided to his own sensibilities, forged through
the more dissonant and angular textures he wielded with DNA
and assorted other NYC downtown acts (Lounge Lizards, etc.).
He’s scaled back the more dramatic contrasts utilized on earlier
works. Now the flourishes, born of either arrangement or production,
are subtle and more constant. Pleasures of the flesh and dreams
of the heart empower the songs. The earthy poetics of the
lyrics celebrate sensuality as they trace the outlines that
the music completes.
—David
Greenberger
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