Hurley is the one who’s been most noticeably absent from the music scene in recent years – he has a construction company and has largely retired from drumming – and to hear Watt tell it, the chance to play with Hurley again was one of the main attractions of this project. Hurley had to literally brush the dust off.
“There were dust clouds in the studio,” Mike Watt laughs. “We were all saying, ‘whoa, what’s this about?’ Georgie hadn’t been playing in a while; it was coming off of his fucking heads!”
Dusty or not, listening to His Master’s Voice, I had the feeling Hurley drove a good amount of this record, and that without him the whole thing would fall apart.
Which brings us, finally, to the music. The tragedy here would be if the resulting product were safe. With all these names and expectations, what if the results were…ordinary? Well, not to worry. The record feels clearly jazz-inspired, improvisational and borderless. There’s a nervousness and a funk that holds over from the old days, driven by that probably unconscious rhythm section.
Baiza’s guitar is like a dentist’s drill, something you feel creeping up your spine. The vocals are matter-of-fact, more like beat poetry than singing, and a less pretentious version of Jim Morrison’s “Indians scattered on dawn’s highway bleeding…”
ITunes calls the album “Unclassifiable,” and indeed classifying it would be tough. Jazz-groove spoken word with some punk freak-out guitar? It sounds like something from deep within some dark, destined-for-scandal psychiatric ward. Horrible noise in some places – no two ways around it. But never safe and never stagnant.
Too often a reunion-style album sounds like a pale imitation of the old days. Of all the musicians of the recent past, though, none are better insulated against this fate than those of the eighties underground. Their entire scene was built not on hit songs but on originality and hard work. They broke out of the stagnant cover band scene of the seventies by playing what they wanted; they stayed original within the world of punk by never letting punk define them.
So it shouldn’t surprise us that, even with a little dust on the drums and a few more grey hairs, these men are still exploring.
– Tom Vale