There’s a lot going on this weekend — from the Kentucky Derby to Cinco de Mayo festivities and nerd Xmas (“May the Fourth Be With You…”) — so thought it only appropriate to add to the grandeur by weighing in with a few recommendations. In honor of the horsies and the titular riders we’ll focus on four returning acts, each of which have been around for at least twenty years and are back with somewhat unexpected albums. We’ll start with the babies of the bunch, both in overall years and number of albums under their belts.
Hailing from the UK it’s the Libertines, back with only their fourth album in their 20-plus year existence, All Quiet on the Eastern Esplanade. For those who might’ve forgotten, the lads from London exploded on the scene with their early-aughts classic Up the Bracket, followed it quickly two years later with the strong, self-titled sophomore outing, and then disappeared for over a decade as the band succumbed to friction between frontmen Carl Barât and Pete Doherty and the latter’s very public struggles with addiction. When they reemerged in 2015 with the better-than-expected Anthems for Doomed Youth you wondered whether it was the start of a new chapter for the band or a one-off token of nostalgia for those missing the raucous records of their early years.
The answer provided by their latest resurrection, a full nine years after the last, seems to lie somewhere in the middle. The opening trio of tracks definitely call to mind those first two albums, as well as the smoking second to last track, “Be Young” — high energy, somewhat flippant in tone, almost threatening to spin out of control. Those are juxtaposed with more mid-range fare, which find the band channeling a more subdued, cinematic sound as heard on tracks like “Merry Old England,” “Night of the Hunter,” and “Shiver.” It leads to a more eclectic (some might say erratic) experience, one where you’re not quite sure which band you’re going to get from song to song (a trend that continues across each of the subsequent albums here), but there’s enough strong material to keep you coming back for more. They may not (solely) be the ramshackle firebrands of the early 2000s anymore, but they’ve evolved into a somewhat more layered, laidback incarnation that hopefully has more longevity than the former would allow. Check out the shot straight back in time that opens things up, though, “Run Run Run:”
Up next comes the second relative baby of the bunch, albeit from the far more prolific pair from Akron, the Black Keys. Pat and Dan also debuted back in 2002, but they return to the fold with their twelfth album, Ohio Players, coming relatively hot on the heels of 2022’s Dropout Boogie, which landed at number #6 on my annual year-end list. Similar to the above band it’s a bit of a mixed bag that finds the guys calling on earlier material, though not the stuff you’d necessarily expect. As fans of the band are well aware (of which I am one), the Keys are known primarily for their threadbare throwback blues, making a tremendous amount of racket with just a guitar and drums. They’ve expanded this sound some in recent years, exploring other genres and adding occasional luxuries like bassists (both to their tours and records), but for the most part they’ve stuck with the formula that launched them to stardom so many years ago.
This time, though, they’re tossing things up — to start, this marks the first time the band have turned over songwriting responsibilities to someone else. Sure, they’ve recorded plenty of covers over the years — whether of single artists as on 2006’s Chulahoma EP, where they reinterpreted a number of Junior Kimbrough tracks, or of several as on 2021’s excellent Delta Kream (which landed at #12 on that year’s list), where they covered Kimbrough, RL Burnside, and John Lee Hooker, among others — but those were always deliberately backward-looking affairs. To this point they’d never done so for albums of original, modern material. This time the boys have written only a single song themselves, handing the pen to a pair of somewhat unlikely authors for the remainder — Beck and Noel Gallagher.
The former (with an assist from the even more-unexpected Dan the Automator) composes the majority of the album’s songs (7 of its 14 tracks), while the latter offers a trio in the middle, and as a result it finds the band far less in bluesy, gritty garage rock mode and much more channeling the sounds of their scribes. The Beck songs sound sorta like Beck songs — whether he’s singing on them or not, as on the single “Paper Crown” — while the Gallagher ones are reminiscent of his recent High Flying Birds material. Meanwhile on the sole track they wrote themselves, Pat and Dan still steer clear of their tried and true sound, opting instead for that of their 2009 side project Blakroc, which found them placing their scuffed up sound behind some of hip hop’s finest vocalists — from Wu’s ODB and RZA to Ludacris, Mos Def, and Q-Tip. That marriage worked rather well (as everyone knows the best hip hop balances both blistering bars AND banging beats) and they turn the trick again here with probably my favorite tune on the album, “Candy and Her Friends.” When guest rapper Lil Noid comes in he raps over a simple, yet irresistible beat by Pat that’s impossible not to get sucked into. See for yourself here:
We’ll shift now to the elder statesmen half of the quartet and a pair of bands that have been around for over thirty years, both dropping their debuts in the first year of the 1990s. They hail from opposite corners of the country (the first from Seattle in the Pacific Northwest, the other from Atlanta in the Southeast) and both are synonymous with a specific sound (the first grunge, the latter Southern rock). They’ve released over twenty albums between them and had to deal with their fair share of tumult over their three decades of service — the first from the death of rival/inspiration Kurt Cobain, the death of nine fans at one of their shows, and dealing with becoming the voice of a generation, the second from spiraling tensions between the band’s founding brothers, which ultimately culminated with a series of breakups and the pair not speaking for over eight years.
We’ll start with the venerable veterans from the northwest, the indefatigable institution known as Pearl Jam. Like the Keys the band is back with their twelfth studio album, their first since 2020’s Gigaton, and it’s a marked return to their more uproarious ways after the more eclectic experimentation of that outing. The band sets the tone from the outset with the hard charging “Scared of Fear,” which has the band firing on all cylinders, from guitarist Mike McCready’s scorching solos (the first of many on the album) to drummer Matt Cameron’s pummeling beats. Cameron in particular sounds more invigorated than ever throughout — perhaps a product of the band recording the album together in two quick sessions over three weeks, in contrast to the disjointed, individual demoing and recording that stretched on for years for its predecessor. That sense of being in the same room and feeding off each other is reminiscent of their earlier material, as Gossard, Ament, and Vedder are equally sharp and fiery.
The album is fortuitously timed, as I recently finished reading Steven Hyden’s Long Road: Pearl Jam and the Soundtrack of a Generation, which per usual does a nice job covering the history of the band while entertainingly overlapping those observations with any number of random pop culture references. (Hyden weaves in everything from Gene Simmons and Kiss, John Entwistle and the Who, and Scott Weiland and STP to the Seattle bands, the Grateful Dead, and more here.) One of Hyden’s assertions is that late era Pearl Jam (starting anywhere around 1996’s No Code or 1998’s Yield, depending on the depth of your dedication) is almost universally agreed to be less unassailable than the opening trio of Ten, Vs., and Vitalogy. (Some might even cruelly call it “inferior.”)
His second point (which reinforces the first) is that Pearl Jam are primarily a live band — meaning the true power of them comes through in their consistently epic two-plus hour shows — and that they don’t really know how to record an album. Not that they don’t know the mechanics of the latter process, just that they don’t seem to know how to get the best out of themselves when put in that environment, either rushing things or laboring on them past the point of diminishing returns. And while I mostly agree with both points — they are phenomenal live, always changing their setlists and stocking them with choice covers, and their later material is not as effortlessly powerful as their earlier albums — I actually think they’ve been better longer than Hyden gives them credit for.
Hyden started to part with them around the time of Yield, which he says was the last album he bought immediately without hearing it first. I stuck with them in this fashion through 2002’s Riot Act, which bookends their more experimental middle phase that stretched from the underrated No Code through that latter album. (Both it and 2000’s Binaural I think are unfairly maligned and better than you remember upon revisiting.) This phase coincided with a lot of the aforementioned tumult, which Hyden does a nice job recounting, and found the band branching out beyond the muscular, “yarling to the heavens” mode that characterized its near-flawless opening trio of albums, but still generated mostly solid records in my opinion.
The band began its third, “professional rock band” chapter (or their “senior citizen era,” per Hyden) with its self-titled album in 2006 (the “avocado” album), which found the band comfortably commencing career mode — they’d ridden out the rocky patches of that middle section and settled into a contented late stage of development that comes with finding happiness in your professional and personal lives. Hyden says bands in this phase drop albums that are either “comeback” albums or “we’re back!” ones — “A comeback album genuinely reestablishes a legacy act by producing songs that can stand with their most famous hits. Tattoo You by the Rolling Stones is a comeback record — it features songs like “Start Me Up” and “Waiting on a Friend” that became commercial hits and lasting fan favorites. A “we’re back!” album, meanwhile, seeks to remind listeners of what they liked about a legacy band, so that they’re compelled to reinvestigate the old records or buy a concert ticket without ever fully committing to the new record. Voodoo Lounge by the Rolling Stones is a “we’re back!” record — it has a lot of tunes that sound like classic Stones songs, but it doesn’t top or match those songs. It just makes you excited about putting on Sticky Fingers or Some Girls again.”
He and I agree that PJ’s albums in this era all fall into the “we’re back!” category — from the avocado album in 2006 to 2009’s Backspacer, 2013’s Lightning Bolt, and the aforementioned Gigaton. They have a handful of good tunes, but for the most part they just remind you about those earlier eras’ albums and drive you back to them. (Or to see the band in concert, which I hope to do again this summer.) This one comes the closest they’ve been to “comeback” territory for a while and may still get there after some more listens (it’s only been out a few weeks). Whether it does or not, though, it’s already among the better “senior citizen era” albums they’ve released, with McCready’s solos on tracks like “Waiting for Stevie” and the title track being highlights, contrasted nicely by slower songs like the lovely “Wreckage” and “Something Special.” (The latter of which gets a co-writing credit from touring guitarist (and ex-Chili Pepper) Josh Klinghoffer for the first time.) The title track is one of my early favorites, so strap in and see which bucket you’d place it in here:
Last but not least comes probably the most surprising return from the quartet’s most senior act — not just because the album exists, but also because of its unexpected quality. It comes courtesy of the Black Crowes, whose debut came out a year before PJ’s in 1990, while their latest marks their ninth, arriving a full 34 years later. For those who’ve followed this band, they know their initial success (similar to PJ’s in that their first two albums were nearly ubiquitous successes) presaged a period of even more fractious volatility that led to a number of departures and breakups (or “indefinite hiatuses,” depending on your level of spin.)
For the Crowes this volatility stemmed almost exclusively from the ongoing acrimony between frontman Chris Robinson and his brother Rich, which was a black hole at the center of the band that over time sucked everything around it into its toxic void. It led to the departure of each of the original band members at one point or another, three official hiatuses, and a number of albums that one might classify as merely mediocre, not worthy even of Hyden’s “we’re back!” status. (Ironically, Hyden has also written a book on this band, 2019’s Hard to Handle: The Life and Death of the Black Crowes, which is now in my backlog for future scrutiny/enjoyment.)
While in the midst of the eight year isolation their third breakup spawned, the ice surrounding the brothers slowly began to thaw. Around the time of the 30th anniversary for their debut it appears they finally buried the hatchet (under how much cement remains to be seen) and began planning a big reunion tour to play the album. These plans were largely scuttled due to the pandemic (thanks a lot, China…), but the brothers stayed in each others’ good graces and began recording new music during the lockdown. That music eventually culminated in this year’s Happiness Bastards, which the brothers described as an attempt at “a Saturday night” record, meaning an uptempo, let your hair down rocker calibrated to get the party started.
That they largely succeeded is a testament to their even more surprising reconciliation. There’s rollicking retro tunes like “Bedside Manners,” “Rats and Clowns,” and lead single “Wanting and Waiting,” which showcase just how much juice these guys could squeeze in their high-flying heyday. As always the brothers juxtapose these with slower, more soulful songs like the bluesy “Wilted Rose” and “Bleed it Dry” or the stately closer “Kindred Friend,” which offer a soothing respite from the higher octane offerings. It’s a surprisingly fun listen — one I’d argue falls closer to comeback territory than “we’re back!” — and gets off to a great start with the blistering “Bedside Manners.” Give it a listen (plus an extra from that excellent debut because even though I’m calling it a comeback album, I still went back to the beginning for a dip — sue me) here:
In honor of the holiday we’ll close with a quick addition to give us the necessary cinco for the post — appropriately off the fifth album from fave UK punks IDLES. It’s been on frequent repeat since its release a month or so ago and finds the band again pairing with producer Kenny Beats (he worked with them on their excellent album Crawler, which landed at #3 on my 2021 list), as well as Radiohead sixth man Nigel Godrich. While their last album was a delightfully punishing listen, this one portends to probe their softer side, offering us an album full of love songs, according to frontman Joe Talbot. And while it’s definitely more subdued than the aforementioned album, it’s not like the band recorded a series of saccharine ballads a la Poco or Bread. The band balances moodier fare like “A Gospel,” “Grace,” and “Monolith” with more traditional scorchers like “Hall & Oates,” “Jungle,” and their collab with LCD Soundsystem “Dancer,” which despite not liking at first has grown on me, being perfectly placed mid-album. In honor of the ponies, though, we’ll go with an early fave, the aptly named “Gift Horse” whose weird little freak out at the end is oh so satisfying. Give it a ride here:
Until next time, amici…
–BS