Drunken Sailor – 08 January, 2021
Garage-rock that starts running and never stops. Keep up.
Garage punk as a car alarm, surf rock as doomsaying. So it goes for Stiff Richards on State of Mind: an album of maximum RPM strum & scream that trades any perspective offered by slowing down in favor of watching the landscape blur by in the windows. The intersection of The Orwells and Hot Snakes is what we’re dealing with here; party music for people who are less interested in having a good time than they are throwing a full can of beer at someone (or, perhaps, for people whose idea of fun is throwing a full can of beer at someone).
The nine-song record’s strongest section is its first four, a 13-minute run of urgently defiant, borderline explicitly political music performed by a band that seeming only ever listened to The Stooges and select early works by The Men. “Point of You” is the kind of charging, statement-of-purpose kissoff that more albums would do well to start with. As far as a perspective goes, Stiff Richards get to it early: “Words have meaning / don’t believe them / lies have patterns so / say them backwards.” Deconstruct this couplet and it really doesn’t mean anything. Listen to it while the bass line charges across a wire, while the drummer tries to pick a hole through their high-hat and it comes off like gospel from the mount. The pace and perspective doesn’t drop for the next three songs, never quite reaching the breakneck highs of the album opener but sustaining a maniac momentum (the stabbing repetitions of “Going Numb” come to mind as another highlight).
When the album slows down, it does so almost grudgingly. “Mr. Situation” plods – as much as someone hopped up on cheap speed can be said to “plod – while “Got It To Go” is perhaps the most immediately accessible song, an agreeable middle region for those who would prefer a little more weed or casualness to their garage rock. The breaks aren’t really breaks; we’re still howling even if the dancefloor is opening up. They don’t last long, either, as the album closes out as fast and defiant as it starts (a sample from “Fill in the Blanks: “What’s above your neck / is it just your head… / or is it nothing at all”).
Look too hard at State of Mind and one might walk away with the sensation that Stiff Richards didn’t say a lot as much as they said the one thing, loudly, over and over again. That’s a feature, not a bug. The point is to sharpen garage-punk into a bullet, fire it at the world with a smile on your face. It’s bludgeoning, but it’s effective.
Churchill Downs is a guy who lives in Philadelphia and who might write about your band.
