A quick drum fill, a shout, and a blast of guitar kick off Local H’s ninth album, Lifers, before frontman Scott Lucas growls, “Got a brother in a cheap red hat/Hazy days in a judge’s frat.” The song, “Patrick Bateman,” authoritatively announces the band’s presence, with massive guitars that practically race the track’s frenetic drumming and a throat-searing performance from Lucas, whose vocal cords were damaged in a mugging in Moscow in 2013. The lyrics are a blunt tirade about politics, comparing the alt-right to the protagonist from Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho, but what they lack in nuance is compensated for with unmitigated rage. It’s been five years since Local H’s last album and 25 since their debut, but the band hasn’t lost any speed off the fastball.
Lifers is an apt title for an album by a band that only ever flirted with mainstream success in the mid-’90s, when anything resembling grunge still had enough cachet to get airplay. The band’s lone radio hit, “Bound for the Floor,” is a catchy piece of angst-ridden alt-rock, but it would be easy to mistake it for a song by any number of forgettable groups from the post-Nirvana explosion. It isn’t all that representative of why Local H has such an intense cult following. Their live performances are the stuff of legend, and they’re much more aligned in sensibility with Midwestern punk bands like Dillinger Four than also-rans like Candlebox. With the help of veteran producer Steve Albini, Lifers finds Local H still crackling with energy, with a batch of songs that blend mammoth punk energy with power-pop melodicism.
At the album’s heart are two colossal tracks, “Beyond the Valley of Snakes” and “Defy and Surrender.” The latter is a wide-open rocker that lets the band stretch its legs, wending its way over 10 minutes of guitar heroics, while “Beyond the Valley of Snakes” has a sinister, creeping atmosphere, aided by a sneaky synth line undergirded by drummer Ryan Harding’s Cro-Magnon beat. “Take your ball and go home/It’s no fun anymore,” Lucas smirks during the pre-chorus before the song explodes into a monolithic, shout-along chorus. The song cultivates a mood of ominous portent and vicious triumphalism.
Lifers’s most memorable song, “Sunday Best,” is also the least like its others: a gentle meditation on morality, life, and death that’s accompanied by some plangent, multi-tracked acoustic guitars. Its stripped-down musicality showcases Lucas’s facility with melody, which has always been what set Local H apart from their peers. It’s a moment of respite from the album’s otherwise aggressive sonic attack. Elsewhere, the melodic “Winter Western” features a backing vocal by Juliana Hatfield that gives Lucas’s more staid singing a ghostly counterpart.
The album’s sole misstep, “High Wide and Stupid,” veers dangerously close in sound to early-aughts “butt rock,” a subgenre of hard rock that seems antithetical to everything Local H has ever stood for. The song’s lyrics are a slight attack on the venality and shallowness of a culture that performs itself for social media, sounding more like an old man yelling at the cloud than anything incisive. That track aside, though, Lifers proves Local H is still capable of creating anthemic punk songs that deftly straddle genre lines. Lifers, indeed.
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