REVIEW: Mike Watt, Contemplating The Engine Room (Columbia)
- Al Muzer
An honest, blue collar presence in an increasingly white collar musical world, former Minutemen/fiREHOSE bassist Mike Watt's second solo offering pays a gritty, sprawling, free-form homage to his father, strong coffee, the Navy, drowning, the towns of San Pedro and Red Bluff, shore duty, his former bands and salt o' the earth guys with dirt under their nails and sweat on their brows.
Returning to the three-man configuration (with guitarist Nels Cline and drummer Steve Hodges) that suited him so well in his previous outfits - Watt thunders mightily on the edgy, drone-like "In The Engine Room"; mixes jazz, JJ Cale and Sonny Sharrock on "Red Bluff"; vents his spleen on a very Minutmen "Bluejackets Manual"; and spends the rest of this challenging, but ultimately satisfying disc, bouncing from fiREHOSE free-forms, full-on guitar freakouts, percolatin' mothership funk, salsa-fueled fusion, bossa nova Django, acid rock, ambient noise, Lizard King darkness and salty, Popeye-caliber seafarin' ditties.
Conceived, according to Watt, as a punk rock opera "about three guys [working together] in the engine room of a boat"; Contemplating The Engine Room - which name-checks folks such as Hurley, Ginn, Hart, Mould, Rollins, the Kirkwoods, Norton and D Boon (D Boon is "The Boilerman") - serves as a cathartic coming to terms for one of alternative music's most influential elder statesmen while it also celebrates the sound of "three [new] people playing together."
