There’s rock that does whippets on its lunch break and rock that hasn’t called out sick in two years, and the line between a blasphemous song and one that’ll sell a car is thinner than it might seem. It’s a boundary defined by the pretense of danger. The Muckers, a Brooklyn outfit fronted by Iranian émigré Emir Mohseni, fall on the buttoned-up end of that spectrum. Endeavor, the group’s debut, is a wide-eyed paean to the comforts of ’80s radio rock, a mild and uptempo album that revels in Quaalude choruses and room-temperature licks.
Each of these 10 sunny songs plays clean, save for a bit of fuzz. “Roll the Dice” has the sheen and charm of “Jesse’s Girl,” with insistent guitars and a melody that begs for an arm out the window on the turnpike, a smokestack spewing in the background. Anthony Azarmgin’s bass rumbles underneath “Suspended” like a fist pumping to a Springsteen song. “Thunderstorm” and “That’s All I Want” showcase the group’s nimble guitar work, swerving seamlessly between structure and embellishment to flesh out what would otherwise be a series of plodding power chords. Like a Budweiser ad on an old VHS tape, the whole thing has a sense of winsome, all-American nostalgia.
In terms of delivery, it’s hard not to draw comparisons to New York proto-retro-rockers the Strokes, whose lyrics are barely more incisive but worlds more convincing. The words on Endeavor are magnetic poetry collages of feelings, classic rock motifs so universal as to be anonymous. “Daydreams are over/Now I must find my way/My days are numbered/I’m running out of time,” Mohseni sings on standout track “Suspended,” without any palpable sense of urgency. The song’s amiable, anthemic chorus would make an excellent jukebox selection (“Take it as a sign, take it as a sign/Something good will happen soon”), not unlike Big Star’s “In the Street,” but a close read comes up empty. Chic-lite disco outlier “So Far Away” suffers from a similiar excitement deficit, even when it explicitly mentions sex and weed, and while the less funky tracks can coast on good vibes and riffs, this bassline feels limp.
Not every rock record needs to cause liver damage, but instruments of debauchery—electric guitars, snares that hit like water on a hot stove—feel oddly matched against the Muckers’ tame affect, a not-quite-saturated imitation of passion. Where’s the beef? The composite parts are sometimes remarkable, but in aggregate, Endeavor fades as easily as an oldies station on the far edge of town.
Buy: Rough Trade
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