Breaking the Balls of History

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Despite his often upbeat melodies and maniacally joyful keyboards, Sam Coomes has never sounded like a glass-half-full kind of guy—singing for nearly 30 years about hurting the one you love, limping out the door, feeling better under a cloud, being "stuck in this rotten lump of me." Things are no different on the band's 10th album. Set against Coomes' Rocksichord skronk, "Nowheresville" rolls its eyes at the insincerity of social-media sentiment after tragedy (Thoughts and prayers/ Won't get you there … Maybe cry a single tear.") A dark sea chanty with a brutish drum beat, "Rotten Wrock" takes a gimlet-eyed look at the state of the world—and declares it's, well, pretty damn rotten. "What exactly is a human being?/ A little button on a touch screen … Everybody knows it ain't no fun/ To matter less than a machine gun," Coomes sings, before the whole thing flips a middle finger and signs off in a crash of what sounds like breaking glass and a flushing toilet. There's more subtlety on "Shitty Is Pretty," with its hopped-up beat, lovely mid-'60s naive melody and amusingly biting lyrics: "Shitty is pretty/ So sick of quality, babe." No ordinary sad sack, Coomes is like a modern-day Warren Zevon—raised eyebrow, bemused irony, but nevertheless creating sounds that make you feel good—on a song like "Doomscrollers," which is like a 2020 bingo card: virtual classes, baking bread, anti-vaxxers, "puffed up patriot pigs [with] Punisher skulls on backs of their rigs." Funny thing is, this album served as a saving grace for Coomes and drummer/band co-founder Janet Weiss. The duo had taken a break after 2013's Mole City, but revitalizing force came in unexpected sources: In 2019, Weiss left her longtime day job in Sleater-Kinney (after a fallout that she characterizes as a freeze-out) and broke both legs in a car wreck. Then the pandemic took hold of the world. "There's no investing in the future anymore," Weiss says she concluded. "The future is now. Do it now if you want to do it  …It could be gone in a second." It led to a rush of creativity, with the album recorded in just five days. Catchy and bittersweet "Queen of Ears," its keys flailing, evokes ELO x Pavement as well as the band's own brilliant Field Studies from 1999. "Riots & Jokes" offers up showy red-hot keyboards (as well as the line "Uncle Sam, sick old man," which could be criticism of the U.S. or Coomes himself). "Back in Your Tree" and "Last Long Laugh" pack the heavy thump of '70s metal, while "Gravity" has a spacey Bowie feel, and "Inbetweenness"—with Weiss taking the mic and drawing out the words like taffy—is positively trippy. And "Breaking the Balls of History" needs just five words (that's the whole song, with the title repeated several times) to remind you that, despite it all, life is worth fighting for. © Shelly Ridenour/Qobuz