Review: Bob Mould – Life and Times (2009)
Bob Mould has a brand of adult alternative that juxtaposes acoustic intros, compressed walls of distortion, insular and contemplative poetry, and healthy doses of dynamics. It’s slick and modern; in not so many words, then, it’s shockingly similar to every other adult alternative album you’ve ever heard. With every passing track, Mould’s cred screams “respect me!” and in response, Life and Times intones, “why should you?” Respect is something Mould will have to cobble together from his past successes if this is the kind of bland malfeasance he’s going to inflict upon us. It may be the grizzled lament of a late-forties rocker, but just hear the put-on vitriol with which he bites the lines in “Bad Blood Better:” “you used me up without permission / the taste of last night’s sex in my mouth / my breath is blood and sweat / choking like a tourniquet.”
It is both laughable and sad, because despite the fact that it’s over-wrought, Mould clearly has no idea. Fully four people, at very least, must have heard the vocal track before it reached pressing. Likely many more, in fact, and nobody pulled old Bob aside and gently addressed the monstrosity he was apparently prepared to represent himself with. We listeners sometimes forget that these recording sessions are not a one-off experience. It’s quite likely, in all seriousness, that Mould fought bitterly, through multiple takes, for the comically tortured results he achieved. Though he whines his way through two more power-ballad choruses before offering any respite, his creative solo riffing saves the aforementioned “Bad Blood Better” from failing unreservedly.
Bob Mould’s “I’m Sorry Baby, But You Can’t Stand In My Light Anymore.”
The production isn’t doing Mould any favors, either. It has essentially pigeonholed him into vapid, homogenized radio slag that even the most uninformed consumers belch bitterly back up after carefree summer binges; the pitch-correction job is so horribly botched that it borders on parody. The worst part is that, for all the eviscerated credibility, he probably won’t be getting much radio play, though the title track is fairly catchy, along with “Argos,” the one full-blooded revisit to his earlier days (the only other being “Spiraling Down,” an energetic but flaccid blight).
Truth is, people don’t dope themselves into this kind of Pro-Tools stupor because they like their music to sound uninteresting, they do it because they think it’s par for the course. Then again, if Bob Mould wasn’t concerned with mainstream consumption, and still chose to paint himself into this kind of corner, there’s one more reason you need to steer clear of this album. There are just too many names one can call up: Hootie & The Blowfish (“I’m Sorry Baby, But You Can’t Stand In My Light Any More”), Vertical Horizon (“Spiraling Down”), Duncan Shiek (“City Lights (Days Go By)”), Staind (“Wasted World”); the list, good and bad, just goes on.
In most places, the album sounds like a collection of top 40 single b-sides, and Mould seems happy to be mentioned in passing on an NPR featurette by some monotone writer who sounds as if he’s more apt to mask his interest than express it. If it doesn’t signal irrelevance, it sure stinks like it, and Mould’s played-out lyrical style and too-often-boring guitar chops are threatening to breach the hull of a body of work that has long since bedded in.
In order to further assuage the savage rating that I very shortly will unceremoniously stamp on Life and Times, I’d like to point out that Bob Mould has a passion for professional wrestling, and briefly wrote scripts for WCW. He left due to Creative Differences and returned to music. Let’s repeat that: HE STOPPED WRITING SCRIPTS FOR PROFESSIONAL WRESTLING DUE TO CREATIVE DIFFERENCES. Was he trying to oust the old stand-by folding chair prop, and bring in more modern pieces that might be found ringside, like accordions? Perhaps he lobbied for the abolition of costume fabric favorite spandex, and instead proposed the easy-breezy comfort of cotton yukatas? I don’t know — look, we all know that the creative impetus behind the writing for Pay-Per-View wrestling events hangs in most delicate of balances, and a fierce rocker like Bob Mould is, frankly, a loose cannon in that kind of milieu. That, or the tremendous amounts of testosterone pumping through those writing sessions was bottlenecked, because the other writers couldn’t cope with a gay man writing staged grappling techniques for a sport that is already drenched in borderline homoerotic machismo.
Fire as many The Hold Steady comparisons at it as you want, this album simply refuses to be more than ordinary. It is an astonishingly small hamlet of listenability behind a waxed fortress of production. Should Mould continue in this fashion, he will only ever appeal to people his own age, or worse yet, people who can’t graduate past the music they frequented in high school. This isn’t quite the rock and roll credo he subscribed to thirty years ago.
