If you're a fan of Deer Tick, you certainly don't need a lot of convincing to check out Diamond Rugs, but if you're amongst those of us who view the unapologetically likkered-up Providence band to be intolerable but redeemable, this might spark your curiosity as well. After all, collaboration is the closest we'll probably get to intervention for a group who has no incentive to alter its behavior: Deer Tick's star has risen in a manner directly proportional to their willingness to get as ornery about abusing alcohol and women as possible, and their most mean-spirited record to date (2011's Divine Providence) ended up getting them more "spirit of rock'n'roll" praise than ever.
So while prime Deer Tick songwriters John McCauley and Robbie Crowell ultimately play a heavy role here, there are guest spots from better bands which make a ton of sense (Ian St. Pé of Black Lips), a good deal of sense (Hardy Morris of Dead Confederate), and almost none at all (Steve Berlin of Los Lobos, Bryan Dufresne of Six Finger Satellite). But in the end, Diamond Rugs mostly answers the question of "when is a Deer Tick album not a Deer Tick album?" tracing back to why those of us can find McCauley to be intolerable but redeemable: Some of the best songs on Diamond Rugs are his, most of the worst songs too, and between them, pretty much all of the memorable ones.
If it seems like the conversation is skewed toward one band's influence, let me just point out that two of the first four songs go by "Gimme a Beer" and "Call Girl Blues". So yes, Deer Tick's input is the greatest not just in terms of personnel, but in attitude as well. In name alone, that should give you an indication of what to expect, but digging into the substance sets the rules of engagement. "Gimme a Beer" is evidence enough of things McCauley has a knack for-- shredded vocals, a ragged Westerberg melody, and a lack of decorum that can be charming. And hey, the lyrics about all manner of wish fulfillment are funny enough to excuse the Geto Boys reference that serves as the money shot. It's actually a Geto Boys song that most people first heard in Office Space, which leads me to what's problematic about the song. As with people whose conversations consist almost entirely of quotes from movies or TV, McCauley is so reliant on blue-collar rock tropes that he's almost incapable of expressing anything real here. So maybe the chorus of "Who cares?/ Gimme a beer" is supposed to be some sort of fatalistic "fuck it," yet it feels less like an extension of the narrator's emptiness and more like a tic of McCauley's songwriting, taking the path of least resistance.
Likewise, the title of "Call Girl Blues" suggests some kind of empathy or at least insight to its subject, but judging from lines like "Now where did she come from?/ Why should you care?/ Man, you oughta see her when she lets down her hair," you figure McCauley just relished the opportunity to write a song about a prostitute. At the very least, "Call Girl Blues" is willing to acknowledge a woman as a corporeal being and in a weird way, it's actually the most flattering McCauley gets about females, if only because they're seen as more admirable than the chumps who fall in love with them ("She ain't yours/ You can't hold her," McCauley hectors on the chorus). Women don't break up with the guys in these songs, they hightail it out of town, they find comfort in the arms of another man, like, immediately. But above all else, they always leave and you always end up taking their side; how could you not when McCauley exacts revenge on "Tell Me Why" by snarling "I got sweeter things in my mouth/ I swallow them and then I shit them out"? In theory, Diamond Rugs should prove extremely comforting, a celebration of rawk and male friendship in the face of vaguely rendered but all-consuming sexual denial. And yet, there's no catharsis or viscera; writing about down-low women serves as some sort of Mad Lib-ish Oblique Strategy for Diamond Rugs or lyrical gambit similar to Thom Yorke throwing pieces of paper in a hat. It's not so much phony as it is perfunctory, but in this vein of songwriting, both of those terms essentially mean the same thing.
Still Diamond Rugs is occasionally enjoyable if you have no investment in what it "means" either for rock as a whole or any of its participants. If you somehow used alt-country as an entryway to indie rock, Diamond Rugs might be up your alley: "Hightail" likeably kicks up dust bounding down the same roads traveled by Los Lobos, "Country Mile" actually turns out to be dense swamp rock, and, altogether, it finds a nice textural common ground between the more far-flung acts involved here. In terms of the Hank Williams lineage, Diamond Rugs mostly sticks to Bocephus' party-preparedness and the III's lowest-common-denominator appeals to "authenticity," so its nice they honor the patriarch by dropping in "Totally Lonely", which contrasts producer Justin Collins' baritone warble with an electronic drone that almost passes for musique concrète. But the keg's kicked long before Diamond Rugs comes to a close, a point made abundantly clear by the final one-two of "Hungover and Horny" and "Christmas in a Chinese Restaurant". Credit where it's due-- that's some serious truth in advertising right there.
That Diamond Rugs are far longer on camaraderie than inspiration is hardly unique to them; collaborations ranging from Traveling Wilburys to Watch the Throne invariably deal with the difficulty of juggling how much they want to express personally outside of "wow, this was sure fun for us." I don't doubt for a second that Diamond Rugs was a blast-- there are too many goofy horn charts and "guitar" exhortations to think otherwise-- and surely some of these songs got knocked out in the time it for the assistant engineer to make a beer run. But most of Diamond Rugs is like that woman in "Call Girl Blues"-- it's not yours, so you can't hold it.
