REVIEW: Local H, Pack Up The Cats (Island)
- Jason Cahill
When Local H released their breakthrough album, As Good As Dead, two things happened. First, the song "Bound For The Floor" pushed the word 'copacetic' back into the pop culture lexicon and, more importantly, attention was called to a band equally adept in creating both hard rock diatribes and softer, more acoustic based songs. "High-Fiving MF" and "Eddie Vedder" fell on opposite ends of the musical spectrum, but fit nicely on that album, a diverse and eclectic hodgepodge of sound. The only question which remained was which direction the band would take with their next effort. Well, with the recent release of Pack Up The Cats, Local H have provided us with the answer, showing that a perverse maturity does indeed fester behind the band's hardened exterior.
Pack Up The Cats, the third release from the Chicago based duo, seems to be a more cohesive album than 1995's Hamfisted and more focused than As Good As Dead . The album opens with the band's concert staple "All-Right (Oh, Yeah)", a noisy rocker with Local H's trademark blend of overpowering drums and nonsensical lyrics. From there, it's on to the pure unfiltered rock of "'Cha!' Said The Kitty" and "Hit The Skids Or: How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Rock", both laced with Local H's effective blend of cynical sarcasm and testosterone filled beats. But, unlike on their debut album, Hamfisted, the band shows their maturity here by switching moods, playing with styles and trying their hardest to make an album that screams of diversity and musical growth. It works.
"Lead Pipe Cinch" is nothing short of breathtaking in its pure stripped down simplicity, "Stoney" is an instrumental which takes its cue from Van Halen's "1984" (the song, not the album), eventually leading into one of the album's better songs, "Laminate Man", a straight rocker which owes more to Chris Mars than perhaps Local H would care to admit.
Lyrically, Local H are the same playful bunch they've always been. There are times when the album's lyrics are completely nonsensical ("sickle cell anemia, carpal tunnel and bulemia") and downright strange ("I don't know where I'm at / I think I killed my cat"); word phrasings which give one the impression that Local H are somewhere laughing hysterically at what passes for lyrics these days. Yet start to write them off as lyrical hacks and Local H will begin to surprise. Because underneath all the inside jokes and utter silliness, the band can be downright touching. From the gentle beauty of "Lead Pipe Cinch" ("something in my mind won't let my heart and head and mouth connect") to the simplistic, yet dead-on "All The Kids Are Right" ("All the kids, they hold a grudge, you fail them and they won't forget it"). Like the Replacements before them, Local H have discovered that a sense of humor coupled with a sarcastic irony can be a wonderful thing.
In all, Pack Up The Cats represents the maturation of Local H's sound. It's an album filled with the band's blend of playful sarcasm, hyperactive energy and, in its simplest form, fierce melodic rock.
