Every once in a great while, a work of art will come along that, once experienced, forever changes the lives it touches. Creepy Little Noises, the debut album from Portland, Oregon's I Can Lick Any Sonofabitch in the House, is not one of them. This album, and the group as a whole, seem destined to frustrate the few expectations they raise-- never a good sign for folks trying to catch a break. From their bandname and record title to the eerie cover art, to their proclaimed love of country-rock and the liberal use of the word "bad-ass" in their press releases, I Can Lick Any Sonofabitch in the House prep you for a trip they never take.
Things go wrong early: the first track, "John L. Sullivan", named for a champion boxer whose autobiography the band named themselves after, is nothing more than the lead singer (mysteriously credited as "The Hamms Can Full of Rice") rasping a brief, disjointed narrative from the titular Sullivan's point of view. Sounding like Tom Waits on uppers, the track promises untold weirdness, but once its 35-second runtime has expired, "Graveyard Song" begins, almost instantaneously flipping the finger to anyone hungering for more oddness. The production there, and throughout the rest of the record, is surprisingly bright and full, running wholly counter to the twisted Americana aesthetic the band reaches for at the outset. And furthering this incongruity is the band's performance: they sound like studio pros with all traces of personality removed. The majority of country music's original grit was sucked out long ago; Creepy Little Noises is certainly not the record to reverse that unfortunate trend.
Finesse and polish, even in country-rock, don't have to be a death sentence, but in this case, they leave nothing interesting behind. Despite their instrumental competence, I Can Lick Any Sonofabitch in the House write songs like high school students, letting them run on for far too long without introducing new ideas. The results are merely tepid on the rockers, but they positively drag on the album's many ballads, where the riffs are always played on acoustic guitars with that shriveled open-mic-night rhythm that declared itself artistically bankrupt sometime after Ani DiFranco started her own record label. The rasp of the lead singer (whatever his name is), once intriguing, begins to sound like a standard-issue affectation. The band's approach eventually bottoms out with "Walk Across Texas", at best a fourth-rate version of Little Feat's "Willin'". And in addition to intrinsic shortcomings in the ballad department, they fail to play the softies off of the rockers effectively, aiming to depict secretly tender tough guys, but instead coming across as mopes with occasional bouts of energy.
Ultimately, Creepy Little Noises is too vanilla to be bad, but its oppressive slickness makes no convincing argument in its favor. In fact, the only real loss in skipping this disc is "Saturday", which arrives halfway through the album. A detail-heavy narrative of a young boy on one of his beloved Saturday mornings, the song shines like a beacon surrounded on either side by similar elements that never coalesced so well. If I Can Lick Any Sonofabitch in the House choose not to delve deeper into the strangeness they flirt with so onanistically, they would do well to mine the vein unearthed on "Saturday" until they can come up with something better.
