Before there was the White Stripes or the Black Keys, another two-man band pounded its way across the airwaves.
They were called Local H, and they likewise featured a stripped back and furiously concentrated rock attack of guitar and drums. Local H came to the national fore with the hit single “Bound for the Floor” in 1996. The band was likened to grunge outfits like Nirvana and their hit climbed as high as number five in the national charts.
They would never have another big hit. But Local H would also never be relegated to the dustbin of one-hit wonders because this was never a band that gave much of a good goddamn about hits. They have made six studio albums and toured relentlessly, and though you might be tempted to say Local H has quietly amassed one of the more impressive bodies of genuinely ambitious hard rock made in the last decade, there is absolutely nothing quiet about anything they have done.
Local H rips it up. None other than Robert Christigau, the dean of American rock critics, early on identified the band as “to the bash-roil-howl born.” He heaped praise on their second record As Good As Dead for its “isometric power – that sense of tremendous force bravely exerted against implacable reality” and called their third record, 1998’s Pack Up the Cats, the rock record of the year. “They attack the 100-bpm four-four with a singleness of purpose unknown to rap-fearing new metalists, ska-loving old hardcorists, and indie adventurers adrift on the great unknown,” Christigau wrote.
Their most recent record, 12 Angry Months, is a searing chronicle of a romantic breakup that somehow manages to sit alongside classic breakup records such as Bob Dylan’s Blood on the Tracks and Marvin Gaye’s Here, My Dear.
“Those were like the two main touchstones when we were thinking about making the record, just trying to get at the reality of it,” said singer and guitarist Scott Lucas in an interview this week. “You know, there are plenty of songs on the radio about heartbreak and breaking up, kind of romantic comedy versions starring Ashton Kushner or whatever, and I wanted to do something that was kind of ugly and really bloody.”
Bloody indeed. Lucas says things not normally said in song. He manages to hit tones of bitterness, jealousy, loneliness and longing with a sharp-edged sense of humor.
As he sings in “White Belt Boys:” “Yeah, I hope you have a lonely life/a high heel stumble home from the gala with your gurney bag clutched to your chest/Hangin’ on to the arm of the guy who sewed you into your new dress…” Or “March: BMW Man”: “So you are the boyfriend, and nice to meet you, is it Dustin?/And did you say you vote Republican?/Can I get you another sloe gin fizz….All this is crazy/I can’t believe you replaced me/you and your goons from your fraternity/at the bar glued to ESPN….”
This isn’t saccharine music. It’s fairly brutal, often vengeful, occasionally oddly tender and sometimes sonically punishing. It’s also funny as hell, but above all, it’s gut-punchingly honest.
“It was important to be as honest as possible with everything,” Lucas said. “There was no reason to do a record like this if you weren’t going to be painfully honest. One of the rules we had with this record is it should be very painful to listen to and really get down to it and not phone anything in.”
The band, which appears at Brixton this Friday, is on the road with what it calls the “Six Angry Records” tour. Each night, a fan picks one of their six album names out of a hat, and the duo – which features Brian St. Claire on drums – plays that record from beginning to end.
It’s somewhat odd that rock n’ roll history hasn’t seen more two man bands. Less, when it comes to hard rock, is definitely more. Lucas, who founded the band in 1987 with high school classmate Joe Daniels, said that he came across the idea after seeing the proto-weirdo two man outfit out of Athens, Georgia called the Chickasaw Mud Puppies. But more elementally, it happened because he was from a small town in northern Illinois called Zion and there simply weren’t many musicians around.
“There is not a lot to do, and there were not a lot of people that were into the music we wanted to play,” Lucas said. “That was the main reason for forgoing the bass – we just couldn’t find any bass players.” ER
Local H plays Brixton June 18. See www.brixtonsouthbay.com for ticket info or www.localh.com for more on the band. ER
