“Hard Times and Nursery Rhymes”- Social Distortion
Through a series of shenanigans involving a time machine, Mike Ness had been warped to 1934 and decided to write a record or something. So that’s why it took so long to come out after years and years of teasers! It all makes sense now. Seriously, someone needs to nudge Mike and let him know its 2011, the recession kind of ended a while back now. As I’m typing this 80’s punks are sending me hilarious hate mail.
With Social D, people have said you either get this band or you don’t. Honestly, I’ve totally “gotten” this band in the past, and my dad’s a huge fan for sure. All of their albums previous to 2011’s “Hard times and Nursery Rhymes” have been in pretty constant rotation in my car. Maybe it was just that this time I didn’t get what Mike Ness was going for. The album kicks off with the instrumental “Road Zombie”, always a really interesting choice to start a record with an instrumental piece. “Zombie” is actually a pretty awesome opener, with a harder surf punk feel to it with some catchy solo work from Ness. But the issue with the ripping opener is that it in no way sets the tone for the rest of the rather dragging bluesy record to follow. It’s a tease of high energy 80’s-90’s Social D and then a sudden transfer into a totally different realm that left me scratching my head.
That’s not to say the rest of the record is terrible though. It’s more just a disappointment given the frustrating seven year wait. Immediately we’re thrust into a Rolling Stones inspired blues track “California (Hustle and Flow)” where Ness recounts his “Hollywood movie dream” and we begin to see his incredibly confusing quasi-gangster image develop. The song has a striking similarity to the Stones “All Down The Line”, and really brings the band’s influence on Ness into the spotlight. For the rest of the album we get a lot of same, but nothing horrendous. Before I caught the semi-nausea inducing pun in the title, “Gimme The Sweet and Lowdown” I was really digging the song, especially its pre-chorus which continually gets stuck in my head. One qualm I have is the continual use of cliché titles and expressions throughout the record. Let’s see: Diamond In The Rough, Far Side of Nowhere, Writing On The Wall, etc. The album is littered with poetry that just feels really forced and stale to me. The lyrics that really get to me show up in the beginning of the single track “Machine Gun Blues” where Ness professes that he’s “a gangster…1934, junkies, winos, pimps, and whores”. He then continues to tell a story about smoking big cigars, “burying the cash”, and then subsequently “getting some more”. My main question is, why should I care about this man’s strange fictionalized Depression-era fantasy? Hey maybe I’m mistaken though, maybe Mike Ness does pick up whores and bury cash in the desert! I just find it all a little hard to identify with at this point. Point is: “Hard Times” never hooked me lyrically with anything. It mostly felt recycled, manufactured, and frustratingly cliché. Maybe I’m just not a blues junkie.
Musically Social D’s 2011 effort seems to enter some new realms for the aging punk outfit. On tracks like “Can’t Take It with You” and “California (Hustle and Flow)” a dynamic Gospel chorus is factored in and nicely contrasts Ness’s grizzly growl in a really odd way I can’t really explain. Piano is also featured more prominently than any other Social Distortion record, and plays quite a bright role in tunes like “Still Alive” and “Can’t Take It With You”. Sadly, songs drag out much longer than needed with “Bakersfield” coming in at a whopping six and a half minutes. It’s disappointing that they don’t use these extended songs to actually do something interesting or super creative. Instead, we get ANOTHER Mike Ness guitar solo at the tail end of the song. Now don’t get me wrong, Ness really has some chops on guitar, but do we really need a minute long built up guitar solo on every single song? Ness did produce the record after all. The songs just feel too formulaic and while a couple like “Still Alive” are kind of catchy at times, they never pack enough punch like the band intended.
So let’s review, Mike Ness drives 88 mph in his Delorean, gets teleported back to 1934, does some cool stuff with pimps with cigars, writes a pretty mediocre blues album that’s sort of overproduced with a flashy gospel group, and plays more solos than you can count on two hands. Fin.
4.5/10
