Neil Hagerty created a library filled with albums which barely resemble one another. From straight ‘70s dirty boogie rock to cut-up drug hazes, the band trekked through the angles of rock posturing. Hagerty’s career resembles Lou Reed’s insofar as Hagerty changed musical styles as often as Lou switched faces. Like Lou (and virtually every other veteran covered in this blog), listeners often misunderstand Hagerty’s best music, only to revisit it years down the road and praise it. Consistency is the difference between Lou and Neil. Whereas Lou stacks multiple albums on shelves before recording a slight gem, Hagerty’s inclusion on an album almost always denotes at least a solid effort and, at least with the Trux, often moving musical ideas forward. When Hagerty stumbles, as he did on Sweet Sixteen, he dusts himself off and finds some new jive to break down.
Earth Junk (Drag City) may signify Hagerty’s return to orbit after two subpar outing but the usual critical clichés fail to apply here. Hagerty always maintains his focus. He constantly explores new territory. He never strays far from his initial form or, rather, never mangles his sound beyond recognition. He never lost his sense of adventurousness, although sometimes that adventurousness seemed underdeveloped or, well, annoying as hell.
Night Version of the Eternal probes the edge of his last fans’ nerves with seven minute songs containing the same tempo, monotone vocals and masturbatory guitar solos. XI allotted a creative vent to the Howling Hexers hanging around the recording studio and, thus, features a scant three Hagerty tunes. The Hagerty tunes on the album sound sharp lyrically and instrumentally and a new he adds a pained, cracking dynamic voice to the songs. The rest of the songs on the album sound like the jumbled mess of an alt-rock battle of the bands night at a North Dakota college bar.
Somewhere between XI and Earth Junk, Hagerty regained a sense of excitement while retaining his explorative nature. The album doesn’t feature a back-to-the-basics formula so much as it strips out the extra ersatz. As with Hagerty’s solo debut, organ and guitar provide the shifting tapestry for the album and Hagerty spins a web of psychedelic country carnival tunes atop his backdrop.
Like the first two Howling Hex albums and the compilation 1-2-3, Earth Junk contains it fair share of weird lyrical scenarios (or, maybe, strange observations of common situations) and prominently features oddly juxtaposed riffs. “No Good Reason” features a sharp-toothed guitar line straight out of the bridge to a Thin Lizzy song cutting through a gentle nighttime organ melody. Opener “Big Chief Big Wheel” features a merry-go-round structure on the keys while Neil unloads hazy licks in the background. As an added bonus, Hagerty sings nonsensical early rock rhythm toss offs like “sha-la-la-la-la.” The tune features a ton of negative space between the vocal timing and the organ rhythm, lending a creepy atmosphere and a pedistal to Hagerty’s almighty guitar.
In many songs on the album, the space between highlights Hagerty’s virtuoso guitar playing. The minimal atmosphere allows Hagerty to flex his guitar skills and, at times, Hagerty uses this ability to let his ax to teeter on the edge of implosion before dragging it back into the riff. The most effective songs on the album use the hallucinogenic repetition of the organ as a launching pad into the heady riff battery of Hagerty’s Trux tenure. “Contraband and Betrayal” finds Hagerty playing around with some surf rhythm leads and a lot of reverb before he parlays his earnings into acid head guitar that warps into zombie dialogue. Our hero emerges victorious on “Blood and Dust,” wherein he lets go of any restraint he exhibited on the album. The song consists of ghost story keys and a speak-sing murder ballad. Hagerty fills in the blanks with fire. His distorted guitar solos shoot from the amp through the cracks of the organ, wrapping the tune in a scrambled haze akin to Keiji Haino.
And, vualla, the Hagerty we know and love emerges. He looks the same—not too far removed from traditionalists but post-modern enough to move musical dialogue forward. He’s still cocky, showing a fuck-all attitude to naysayers and continuing to do what he does best. Namely, creating records people will hate now and love in five years.
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Sitting, listening to the new Car Commercials LP (Soft Abuse), I thought: “This takes talent.” No, not the listening part but the musicianship, or lack thereof. I mean, Dom DiMaggio knows how to play guitar. Home Blitz showcases DiMaggio’s harmonic side, wherein guitars ring with a bit of dissonance but the melody stay aligned with the garage rock aesthetic. When moonlighting with the Car Commercials project, DiMaggio unlearns guitar. The band sounds like a chopped version of Home Blitz, complete with open gaps and post-modern instrumentation. Unlike Jandek, these guys never tune their guitars in overly-odd ways and strum amateurish, open-tuned mush. They retain some semblance of a rhythm and their guitar mumbles and shrieks often logically fit into the tunes.
But Car Commercials’ sound falls apart in the most glorious way. Each scrap the band throws into the wild fits into place like a giant scrap yard version of Tetris. The guitars fall into and out of the astral rhythm and warbling mid-throat vocals (think Jad Fair minus MAOI-inhibitors). Come to think of it, the closest comparison to the band would be an out-of-rhythm, psychotic Half Japanese.
On their second album in less than a year, Car Commercials add instrumentation other than the usual guitar-drum set up and create a more thematically solid effort. Not to say that the album drops the cacophonous discordant racket found on other releases. Keyboards underscore the discordance, giving it an eerie undertow at times. Pure, unadulterated feedback litters the wastelands of Car Commercials tunes, setting the tunes further apart from sanity.
Lyrically, the band mumbles about people looking at them, pain and other alienating themes to a soundtrack of minimal skronk blues and maximum despair. Fractured thoughts linger beneath scraps of percussion, circus melodies and frustrated guitar spasms.
In all, Eric’s Diary one-ups Judy’s Dust, the first Car Commercials album of the year, by exhibiting the band’s range. The chronic controlled chaos of Eric’s Diary supplements the initial album’s high, lonesome blues. One cannot just pick up a guitar and dream up this type of controlled chaos.
