Bob Mould – District Line

While I’ll be the first to admit that it’s important to acknowledge legacy – our history and roots, musically or otherwise – there’s an unfortunate tendency to allow that legacy to color the present. To not look at something objectively. An example would be, say, if we were talking about the Misfits. Were that band not as seminal as they so obviously are to our subculture, do you think there’s any chance in hell that the current dumbass, cashed-in touring outfit of the band would have any fanbase at all? If they’d had no legacy to bank on, would the post-Danzig Misfits been able to get their feet off the ground with their mad scientist/wrestling shtick? Give me break; in their case, it’s the legacy that matters.

Unfortunately, Bob Mould, or at least the folks at Anti, seem to be banking on his legacy as frontman for Husker Du and Sugar when it comes to his most recent solo outing, District Lines. The album – ten songs in forty-some minutes – sounds like nothing if not a return to the bad old days of, sorry to say, ineffective 90s indie pop. Frankly, it reminds me of being a kid in the early nineties and desperately sitting through 120 Minutes in the vain hope that they’d play a video by someome remotely “punk.” In lieu of that, a song like Mould’s “Old Highs, New Lows” is exactly what they’d play instead: slightly ethereal, mellow, inoffensive but hookless pop for the aging Generation X crowd.

And that’s the unfortunate thing about bowing down to legacies: I want to like this more than I do. I feel as if I’ve let the man down somehow by not being moved by this stuff. Were District Lines written by a dude I’d never heard of before, I wouldn’t give two shits about writing the album off. But it’s Bob Mould, so I feel bad. Yet, ultimately, it’s a forgettable record performed by a man that’s had some goddamn bright moments throughout his career, and that’s all.