Lucero – Women & Work

Rising occasionally to the manly forlornness that species of early rock found in dives and diners punk historians like Jon Savage call the beginning of American punk, Lucero’s Women & Work is nothing if not a feel-good throwback. Overall it is, indeed, nothing but this: fun tunes built on solid foundations with instrumental backing as broad as deep, ultimately lacking substance, each track seventy to eighty seconds too long, with the subject matter blending together into a sort of black and white pastiche of a time in rock ‘n roll that has ended.

The album’s upshot is best embodied in the album’s titular Women & Work, a big, dancey thing that requires both an organ and a piano, brass and snapping entreaties to “let it go! Let it go!” as a narrator entreats his ward to do in regards to (what else?) women, giddin’ drunk and livin’ life. It’s the same kind of fun Chuck Berry once had, and that similarly-whimsical bands like The Gaslight Anthem are just one degree too mean in their east-coast grunginess to replicate with the same precision.

With metaphors involving being “shocked to the bone” by a woman weighing down the occasional punch-through to emotional strength that try to save this album from mere Country, the faintly misogynist extirpation on sex wear a little thin before the album’s through. Those “ghosts down those empty roads/they all know my name” are invisible in the presence of several lines too many about boys being “swept off their feet” by girls “with kisses like lightning.” At the center of the thoroughly under-wrought tales of love and loss is a narrator waxing paternal to a naïve young friend, a friend who should probably be at the helm of each song’s stories. It may be hard for a band of Lucero’s venerable verve to unlearn its perspective, but it would probably help prop up some of Women & Work’s ho-hum subject matter.

Even in fourteen years of music making it would be wrong to say Lucero has lost its edge. It hasn’t. Women & Work has an energy many east-coast bands of an otherwise similar stripe are unwilling to express. That energy – and, with it, the expectation that a band that labels itself as “punk/country” will work as hard at the former as the latter – seems to beg more development of the message and the story. Fans ofThat Much Further West and Dreaming in America probably know where Lucero is going with this one. Many of them will probably be wondering how they aren’t past there yet.