Obits arrived January of last year, finally going public with what, while under wraps, had provoked speculation on an epic scale. Expectations across the board(s) were predicated on the central role of Rick Froberg, voice of Drive Like Jehu and Hot Snakes, consecrating as a given this new venture’s essential entanglement with, and commentary on, his whole portfolio. Predictably, most sought continuance; others, especially with John Reis out of the picture (he’s still in San Diego with Gar and Jason, thrusting ahead with The Night Marchers), banked on Obits issuing forth an irreducibly new kind of deliverance, one whose contours couldn’t be articulated or even surmised. It’s a tired old tale — the ex-member lotto, the dashed hopes, the aura impoverished or lost outright — whose narrative presumptions more often blinker interpretation than enrich it. With Obits, Froberg is up to something else entirely, and while maybe a quarter of I Blame You could pass for Hot Snakes, the strict genealogical impulse here only erects a foil, an ideal type to which the record’s variegated contents bear frankly little relation.
Based in Brooklyn now, and in middle age looking every minute more like Kevin Bacon, Froberg has ostensibly calmed down a bit: his lyrics on I Blame You still radiate eloquent spite, but it’s subsumed, seething, by a default groove that’s both slower and sparser than anything before it. On stage, he’s still brutally exact, slicing through every chord with impunity, but these new cuts channel his muscle memory into less confrontational forms. The progressions are bluer, more expansive: perfumed with the chilly reverb endemic to ’60s r‘n’r, guitars make room for Greg Simpson’s plump, proactive bass lines that, when unfurled, rethink boogie-woogie for this cynical age. A high-strung Kokomo Arnold cover, “Milk Cow Blues,” abuts closer “Back and Forth,” whose triumphant Spectorian stomp — out of that place called leftfield — condenses a host of influences that remain inchoate, or just tamed: almost a direct analogue to Wire’s “Feeling Called Love” in the context of the superego-heavy Pink Flag.
It’s a thoroughly digestible record, then, freed from the downstroke neuroses that basically defined Hot Snakes or the labyrinthine catharsiscore mounted and milked by Jehu — itself a continuation of Pitchfork’s coarse dialogue with a quickly maturing punk scene. I Blame You isn’t a regression into dad mode, but shades of ‘classic rock’ — that boundable time period now hypostasized as a genre of its own — are never far. As guitarist Sohrab Habibion, once of Edsel, writes: “It’s fun for us to see what can happen with that and to try and find our inner Tom Verlaine and Neil Young. We also have a goal of not making the songs too long so, again, it’s a balance. And one in which The Adverts will always win out over The Allman Brothers, but maybe not The Yardbirds.”
Clear enough in principle. These allowances lead, however, to some dilatory tactics. For all the precision, all the caged rage, some songs drag: solos aren’t out of bounds, unfortunately, and Obits like to brood a bit, as on opener “Widow of My Dreams,” before versifying. Likewise, on the bouncy “Two-Headed Coin,” which also extends Froberg’s lyrical fascination with currencies and modes of transaction and their material embodiment: see “U.S. Mint” and the bizarre counter-economy of Suicide Invoice’s “Paid in Cigarettes.” The teases aren’t dynamic enough to feel like taunts, and their resolution is almost entirely telegraphed.
The record’s most compelling entries witness Froberg’s fury bubbling close to the surface. He’s displaced and recombined elements from the résumé, of course, in associatively rich ways, but it’s those serpentine, pummeling Wipers updates that endure: “Pine On,” the anguished “Talking to the Dog,” and “Fake Kinkade” (Thomas, that is), an evisceration of wistful theories on the moment of art: “I walk the cobblestones in starlight/ I feel the moisture on my skin/ I’ve felt the power of imagination move ordinary men.” Duping, duplication, distrust: why even fight the infinite regress of authenticity?
Obits don’t strike me as perfectionists in the absolute, but the nagging motif of I Blame You is one of domestication: a fount of savagistic impulses confined within very specific formal boundaries and only occasionally discharged. Those escapes stick out on this collection, a record whose mercurial polyculture, for all its tensions, can blur, flattened, into a safe middle ground — which, in this neck of the woods, is something quite new indeed.
1. Widow of My Dreams
2. Pine On
3. Fake Kinkade
4. Two-Headed Coin
5. Run
6. I Blame You
7. Talking to the Dog
8. Light Sweet Crude
9. Lilies in the Street
10. SUD
11. Milk Cow Blues
12. Back and Forth
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