Local H

Hey, Killer (2015)

Octopie

Local H seems to catch the occasional reference on PunkNews, and not a whole lot more. It make sense to a degree. They’re more indebted to grunge and classic rock than straight-up punk. But they got reviewed here off-and-on in the mid-to-late aughts, and their consistent wall-of-guitars sound combined with singer Scott Lucas’ embittered wit seems to be a perfect fit for the site. And if you’re looking for something loud and snotty this summer, I haven’t found a whole lot better than their new album, Hey, Killer.

The last Local H album, Hallelujah! I’m a Bum, was their American Idiot– a seventeen-track, politically charged concept album with reoccurring motifs that made them sound more enthused than they had in a decade. Hey, Killer feels like a reaction to that. It’s eleven songs long, including the sparse closing ballad, “I Am A Salt Mine,” which is fine, but leaves you feeling little other than anxiety over than the lyric about losing your leg to a brown recluse. The rest of the album keeps the amps cranked up, and that’s the band’s sweet spot. In the gradually paced, haunting opening track, “The Last Picture Show in Zion,” the guitars are heavy and grinding, while the lyrics seem to indulge in small-town regret (“There’s no more movies in my town / They shut the place up and tore it down”) and give it the finger (“Your white boy blues are a fucking joke.”) Or maybe they just hate The Black Keys. Either way, the pace ramps up for track two, “City of Knives,” a simple fireball that rides on Lucas’ notorious basic chord structure.

From there, the band doesn’t do a whole lot you don’t already know you can do. “One of Us” drops Lucas’ usual smug for a simple, sincere power ballad (a la “O.K.” or “No Problem”) about a deceased friend, and “Age Group Champion” uses an “Eddie Vedder”-like pop sheen to take self-referential jabs at aging rockers (“We’re black flags at half mast/You’re outclassed by your past.”) Fortunately, Local H haven’t become just a tired group of 90’s burnouts riding the Summerland Tour train. The jagged edges of “Mansplainer” and “Gig Bag Road” (“Nobody wants your soul / they don’t even want your rock and roll”); the fierce guitar lines powering “John the Baptist Blues” and “The Misanthrope”; and the snark still radiating through songs like “Freshly Fucked” (“Freshly fucked / we’re being kind of dicks / we make our married friends sick / We forgot our manners”) – it adds up to a band that’s not reinventing any wheels, but proves there plenty of left to be found in a tough, smart rock act that puts their ass into it.