In traditional musical schools of thought, rock and roll works best as a form of protest. It ought to piss off parents and question authority. It’s meant to be abrasive and angry. But with eight albums and 20 years behind the band, Mudhoney's ninth release, The Lucky Ones just doesn't deliver the goods.
The polished, sludgy rock songs on the album, as crawling with cynicism and sneering sentiment as they are, don't seem to inspire rowdy fist-pumping so much as listless, non-committal body-rocking. At this point, they'd have to be, seeing as how some of these dudes must have wives, kids, and mortgages by now. The fact that Sub Pop is still putting out their records is evidence alone that Mudhoney have managed to remain bitter, despondent punks at heart. The title track is almost reflective in tone, lyrically, but Arm's voice doesn't lose its rasped, snotty bite. Throughout the album, Mudhoney rides pretty heavy on attitude, which smacks the listener down well enough. Halfway through the first listen, you realize something you knew all along - these songs stink! They're regurgitated Sabbath and Stooges riffs! They may be executed with prowess, but their bandied crassness isn't just a tried-and-true style, it's a tiresome cliché.
But hey, it's probably for the fans that they don't try anything radical. It's for all the late-'80s club rats that never changed and never wanted the scene to, either. Despite being competently charged and cohesive as a whole (and thankfully sans horns), The Lucky Ones feels uncompromising in the most lifeless sense of the word.
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