Supergrass aren't young anymore (by their own scale, of course; they're, ahem, in their early thirties), and they've reached a stage when they can recall and relive what it was like to be kids. Back to 1994, to be specific, when the trio emerged as gleefully stonerific teenage moppets who turned down Steven Spielberg's offer to make them into the new Monkees, then brilliantly named their underrated second album We're in It for the Money. Instead of taking the (dubious) quick-fame route, the band opted for the more conventional approach: issuing variations on its identifiable brand of good-natured, druggy, arena-sized bubble-glam over the next 13 years and four albums, and establishing itself as one of the most dependable and popular purveyors of outsize British pop-rock (in the UK, that is; in the U.S., they've topped out at #195). They're back to their hijinks again on Diamond Hoo Ha, but from the perspective of, well, a band which opens for the Foo Fighters in basketball arenas.
Though much of Hoo Ha returns to chronicling the same sort of less-than-legal lifestyle that made "Caught by the Fuzz" such an invigorating attention-getter at the height of the Britpop moment, the underlying sentiments have mellowed as Supergrass have grown up, something easily visible by glancing through the band's catalog. In 1994, a 17-year-old Gaz Coombes fretted from the back of a paddywagon about what his mum and older brother would do when they discovered he been busted for blow; on Hoo Ha's expansive "When I Needed You", Coombes is "in the back of a stolen car, going 80 with the headlights off" (metaphorically, I'm assuming-- he's a rich adult now), while pining for a less-specific form of guidance. Later, a sordid nightclub visit leads to what reads like post-infidelity guilt on "345", and even the album's most insatiable pop bangers, "Rebel in You" and "Ghost of a Friend" are swathed in personal nostalgia, celebrating excess and temperance at the same time.
Supergrass worked with producer Nick Launay-- who helmed the last three Bad Seeds albums-- to grime things up a bit, and Hoo Ha's first two songs (and singles) "Diamond Hoo Ha Man" and "Bad Blood", showcase a harder yet still familiar image of the group. The blurry, drug-fueled debauchery and dirty riff-rock is more Queens of the Stone Age than Bolan and Bowie, and plenty vampiric: The title character is some sort of dealer/door-to-door salesman with an afterhours work schedule including seedy hotels, whose business card reads: "When the sun goes down/ I can't resist", then "Bite me!" The shady "Rough Knuckles" protagonist also holes up at by-the-night residences, but in the chorus, Coombes, never one to wallow, drags him out into the light and sets him up as an "outlaw on the run." It should be an appropriate costume for the band to wear, but it's still the case that Supergrass is at its best when making streetlit skulking into A Hard Day's Night instead of taking a stab at Trainspotting.
The triumphal ode "The Return of..." is bait, of course, Supergrass telling us in no uncertain terms that they're back to their old tricks again. The verses, a slight nod to end-is-nigh politics and bullying of the more interpersonal sort, march past militaristically, but when the chorus switches meter and turns woozy, the hint is more than received that the source of inspiration is more than likely still the band's own Hoo Ha Man. Similarly, "Whiskey & Green Tea", about a post-festival night out in Beijing, aims to be a lost in translation free-for-all, but plays more as an enthusiastically told blurry tourist tale.
Maybe "Whiskey"'s the key to why Diamond Hoo Ha doesn't register as the satisfying return-to-form it tries so hard to be: stories about getting fucked up do often get less interesting as the tellers get older. It's that, but also that their sonic schtick wears a little thin here. Supergrass's Original Variations on Electric Warrior-- their pitch-perfect admixture of boogie-based power-pop and spacy rumination-- is still wonderful to revisit, but their attempt to reinvigorate it on this record is like the dirty, partially-satisfying buzz you get from smoking that roach you found under the car floormat. I'm assuming they didn't mean for the name of the album to register as ironic as In it for the Money or Road to Rouen, but Diamond Hoo Ha does seem like an apt description of the glittery nonsense contained within.
