Blood on the Wall's latest gift set courtesy of the folks over at Social Registry, Liferz, triangulates between the Frank Black (or is that Dave Thomas? or Jack White?) in brother Brad Shanks' voice, the Kim Gordon in sister Courtney's, and an aggressive approach to the electric guitar gleaned from 120 Minutes' heyday. It's better than the predecessor Awesomer, which also suffered from titlesucksitis and crappy cover art, and had the further misfortune of defining the BOTW "sound" without applying it to any memorable tunes. That mistake doesn't get repeated here.
Liferz is a good-times rock album on which the prefix "art" is silent and needn't be applied in the first instance. "Rize" chugs along to lyrics about "hustlers in love", "Lightning Song" gets on a serious late period Sonic Youth jag ("Here comes Satan's daughter/To take your hand/Crush your heart" et cetera). "Sorry About Sarah" almost pushes into full on Nirvana territory, falling short and settling for Siamese Dream-era Pumpkins, which is fine with me, because it's about time someone set out to exculpate the cream of the grunge crop not responsible for Candlebox or Puddle of Mudd or whoever; then it finishes with a pisstake on Sam the Sham's "Surfin' Bird", because this, refreshingly, is not a serious record (a point emphatically made by closing track "Acid Fight", which is apparently about an acid fight, non-metaphorical division).
I would say that it's too bad Liferz came out in January, though if you're going to soundtrack 2008, why not go for all twelve months of it?
Blood on the Wall's MySpace.
The Social Registry website.
