Wisecracks in regards to What Made Milwaukee Famous' debut on Barsuk were most likely to take the Austin four-piece to task for a sense of geographical confusion, but I'll be damned if that name doesn't make a hell of a lot of sense this time around. Like the potent potable its name suggests, the band increasingly feels like a gateway to the harder, better stuff.
If What Doesn't Kill Us carries anything over from Trying to Never Catch Up, it's a sense of variety, although that feels less like the result of artistic restlessness than a buffet-style approach to the Hear Music rack. The first time around that could be attributed to the fact that the record was Frankensteined from a 2004 release, but excuses are harder to come by here. The sludgy waltz of "Blood, Sweat & Fears" attempts to mate the brooding masculinity of Britt Daniel with the fevered literacy of Will Sheff in some sort of Austin dream sum, but it doesn't go much beyond "sludgy waltz." As far as science experiments go, however, it's better that than "Sultan", which brazenly solders together Billy Joel's "My Life" and Spoon's "The Beast and Dragon, Adored" with astonishingly flip transparency.
The sense of resolve suggested by a title like What Doesn't Kill Us is contradicted by the album's hangdog lyrics. The self-pitying Ryan Adams grab bag "Cheap Wine" sounds suspiciously jaded for a band that finally got a chance to break out of the SXSW holding pattern. "When I come into your town/ All it ever does is bring me down" Michael Kingcaid sings before his band explodes into a ruckus that's right in line with the topical search for easy answers. Half as long, and exponentially more successful, is the two-minute rave-up of "The Right Place", but all this blind dart throwing and we're only a third of the way through.
So, you get the idea; most of what follows can generally be filed under "indie rock" not so much for a pioneering spirit, but...well, you have any better ideas? At least some songs bring energy to the proceedings: After "And the Grief Goes On...," you'll be headed back to Wilco's Sky Blue Sky to remember what it did right, and "Resistance St." or "Prevailing Wind" throw up softball progressions that sound like they could've been something with soaring vocal melodies.
"In the middle of the night," Kingcaid declares on the dorm-room strummer of the same name, "Everything's gonna be all right/ What you need is love, sweet love." Freed by the liberty of succumbing to cliché, they repeat it over and over again before you can hear the brooms sweeping during the last call of "The Other Side", which bares little divergence to any other song about the same thing. That shouldn't come as much of a shock, considering these guys are obviously fond of slogans-- but you can't help but think that records such as What Doesn't Kill Us inspire movements like Keep Austin Weird.
