#286 Mike Watt - Ball-Hog or Tugboat

I recently read the 33 1/3 book on Double Nickels on the Dime (which has about 5 pages-worth of really great trivia in it that are totally worth the price of admission alone) and got curious about Mike Watt's solo career after The Minutemen. Sounds like this is the one to hit.

I don't even know what to do with this. The Minutemen were a pretty unpredictable lot, but swerved within a particular part of town. This is all over the map, pulled asunder by countless big-time guest stars, seasoned by a thousand cooks. Its pretty much impossible to take in in a single listen, or describe in a single mini-review. Basically it sounds like a lot of pretty good, slightly weird 90's rock songs, largely high-energy, mostly catchy, generally fun. It sounds like a B-sides album, or like a collection of the second-weirdest song off every album I bought in my 20's. That is to say, these aren't the truly experimental songs, just the ones that are slightly off-center. I tend to like songs that really do something new, or do something in particular really well on an album level. This is sort of just a bunch of weird, seemingly unrelated, pretty good songs, that despite my claims of diversity, aren't all that far afield. It's all over the map, but it never leaves the map.

Then again, this was pretty inventive for the 90's. A cover of Maggot Brain? A song complaining about the over-influence of the 70's? "Intense Song for Madonna to Sing"? Its that kind of twistiness that I associate with more-modern bands.

I could go back and forth like this for days.

I think that the B-sides album holds, it reminds me of Pisces Iscariot or the Singles soundtrack, both good, varied collections of 90'sey songs. If you like that sort of thing, check it out. I feel like I'll certainly hear it again, and will come away with a collection of favorites and auto-skips, just like I had in the mid-CD era 4/5