MIKE WATT
“hyphenated-man”
(Clenchedwrench)
Available on CD, LP with download code, iTunes, and AmazonMP3.com
Rating:

From his second solo album Contemplating the Engine Room onward, Watt’s solo album output to date has been centered around concept albums that he affectionately calls “punk operas”. …Engine Room’s 1997 release saw Watt mix parallel storylines about the Minutemen, his father (a career Navy man), and the novel/movie The Sand Pebbles with musical influences as varied as Creedence and Coltrane. The long-in-the-planning followup, 2004’s The Secondmen’s Middle Stand, had Watt going in a different direction musically without straying from his punk roots, performing in an aggressive organ trio to deliver a story that combined the chronology of a near-fatal illness with that of Dante’s Divine Comedy. It took me a little while to get fully into Engine Room upon its release, admittedly, but with Middle Stand this listener was able to plunge in from day one.

Hyphenated-man – which has already been out in Japan since October of last year – is also a concept album/”punk opera”, only without a fixed storyline. Instead, the album is a suite of thirty short songs, each inspired by a character in a Hieronymus Bosch painting. None of the songs are longer than two minutes – most average a minute and a half, actually – and the lyrics are somewhat abstract, slipping in bits of Japanese language here and there. What may be surprising to some listeners is that the whole thing comes off rather accessible. The idea of short songs harks back to the Minutemen, of course – Watt’s self-re-immersion into his first major band’s back catalog was spurred by his participation in the documentary We Jam Econo – but, even though Watt composed all thirty songs on one of his late Minutemen bandmate and best friend D. Boon’s Fender Telecasters, none of the songs are retro recreations of almost thirty years ago. This particular effort was helped during the basic track recording of the album by Watt not recording his vocals and bass parts until much later on – guitarist Tom Watson and drummer Raul Morales recorded their parts, mostly in tandem with few guitar overdubs, without knowing what Watt’s parts even sounded like, by design. (Coincidentally, a few of the guitar parts on the songs – “Belly-Stabbed-Man” is one example in particular – actually come off in the same style as those on the first two fIREHOSE albums.)

One of the most pleasant surprises on Hyphenated-man is Watt’s vocal work, which seems to be at its most comfortable and is definitely at its most varied here: singing sweetly on some tracks, hollering like someone less than half his age on others, reciting in a whisper here, doing multi-tracked harmonies there – whatever each song and each lyric calls for. As it should be.

Is Hyphenated-man the best thing Watt has done in his solo career yet? That’s hard to say, but only because Watt has not really done the same thing twice in the past decade and a half since fIREHOSE split, and he’s not about to start repeating himself, ever. And now that he’s got his own label deal going down, the wait between Watt projects will not be as ridiculous as it was since 1997. Hyphenated-man, is, however, a highly-recommended listen – and the tip of the iceberg as far as Watt’s future musical output is concerned.

Preview: “Hollowed-Out Man”

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