Song About “Rocks Off” by Loud Family With Anton Barbeau
From What If It Works? (123 Records/2006)
I’ve been a devoted follower of Scott Miller’s Beatles/Beach Boys/Rundgren influenced smarty-pants power pop since his day leading college rock (remember that term?) outfit Game Theory in the mid 80’s. GT sort of morphed into The Loud Family in the early 90’s and soldiered on, releasing five good to great studio albums and one EP and going through more line-up changes than the Detroit Lions go through head coaches (or quarterbacks or penaly flags or...) until they finally dissolved for good sometime after releasing Attractive Nuisance to a music consuming public obsessed with cock rock, hip hop and belly buttons in 2000. Loud Family: R.I.P. Or so I thought.
A few years later, I was at the band’s website (www.loudfamily.com), reading the delightfully high-browed “Ask Scott” column and hoping for the good word while never expecting to actually see it when I was tickled to read that Scott was working on a new record. Fantastic!
A few years later still and WIIW is finally done, ready to be served up to – what else is new - a mostly indifferent public. And maybe that’s not such a bad thing this time around. WIIW just isn’t that good. I was under whelmed. Disappointed. Saddened, even. I mean, I go back over 20 years with the dude! Sharing billing and songwriting duties with this Anton Barbeau fellow is bad enough when all I want is Scott. Then there are three covers (the Stones “Rocks Off” is one of them, naturally, an seems odd choice of a cover for sure, though it is actually pretty cool to hear Scott wrap his so called - by him - “miserable whine” of a voice around the Jagger lead). In the final accounting, only four of the twelve songs were written by Scott and Scott alone, and while all of them are pretty good to very good, none of them are revelatory. I need revelatory, dammit!
Keep at it Scott, I’ll stick with you no matter what you do, but I hope next time you’ll stay in the woodshed until those pop gems are polished by your hand and your hand only. I’m including “Song About ‘Rocks Off’” here because it is a pretty solid representation of a stellar Scott Miller tune, all literate wordplay, yummy hooks and harmonies teetering on the cliff edge of disintegration without ever taking the plunge.
Sometimes you’ve gotta take what you can get.
From What If It Works? (123 Records/2006)
I’ve been a devoted follower of Scott Miller’s Beatles/Beach Boys/Rundgren influenced smarty-pants power pop since his day leading college rock (remember that term?) outfit Game Theory in the mid 80’s. GT sort of morphed into The Loud Family in the early 90’s and soldiered on, releasing five good to great studio albums and one EP and going through more line-up changes than the Detroit Lions go through head coaches (or quarterbacks or penaly flags or...) until they finally dissolved for good sometime after releasing Attractive Nuisance to a music consuming public obsessed with cock rock, hip hop and belly buttons in 2000. Loud Family: R.I.P. Or so I thought.
A few years later, I was at the band’s website (www.loudfamily.com), reading the delightfully high-browed “Ask Scott” column and hoping for the good word while never expecting to actually see it when I was tickled to read that Scott was working on a new record. Fantastic!
A few years later still and WIIW is finally done, ready to be served up to – what else is new - a mostly indifferent public. And maybe that’s not such a bad thing this time around. WIIW just isn’t that good. I was under whelmed. Disappointed. Saddened, even. I mean, I go back over 20 years with the dude! Sharing billing and songwriting duties with this Anton Barbeau fellow is bad enough when all I want is Scott. Then there are three covers (the Stones “Rocks Off” is one of them, naturally, an seems odd choice of a cover for sure, though it is actually pretty cool to hear Scott wrap his so called - by him - “miserable whine” of a voice around the Jagger lead). In the final accounting, only four of the twelve songs were written by Scott and Scott alone, and while all of them are pretty good to very good, none of them are revelatory. I need revelatory, dammit!
Keep at it Scott, I’ll stick with you no matter what you do, but I hope next time you’ll stay in the woodshed until those pop gems are polished by your hand and your hand only. I’m including “Song About ‘Rocks Off’” here because it is a pretty solid representation of a stellar Scott Miller tune, all literate wordplay, yummy hooks and harmonies teetering on the cliff edge of disintegration without ever taking the plunge.
Sometimes you’ve gotta take what you can get.
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