Even before its release, What The…, the new seventh Black Flag LP, seemed like a footnote. The primary narrative was, of course, the Great Black Flag Debacle of 2013, a yearlong mire of dueling reunions, media mudslinging, a failed lawsuit and—less than a week prior to the record's street date—a face-palm-inducing fallout with vocalist Ron Reyes, who appears on the album. In this tabloid-ready context, it wasn't surprising that advance press for What The... took the form of a web-wide snarkfest over the album cover rather than a serious look at three advance singles, the first new music in 28 years from one of the great American rock bands.
The dwarfing of Black Flag's output by their legend is nothing new. At this stage, any casual indie-rock fan can recount the saga: the police scuffles, the grueling practice regimen and trailblazing cross-country tours, that indelible Raymond Pettibon logo. Even the band's evolution from anthemic hardcore crew to sadistic sludge collective—encapsulated on the once-controversial, now-canonical second side of the My War LP—has become part of their mystique. Miraculously, the music retains the power to shock. Could this scrappy SoCal punk band really have produced, in just 10 years, such a weird cornucopia of sounds? The fist*-*meets-mirror blow of Damaged is one thing, but what about the frenetic sass of Nervous Breakdown, the feel-bad art blues of Slip It In, and the DIY-fusion instrumentals of The Process of Weeding Out?
Henry Rollins became Black Flag's poster boy, but the man responsible for their maverick trajectory was Greg Ginn, a musician justly renowned as hardcore's greatest instrumentalist. He complemented his guitar concept—queasy, untameable, calculatedly wrong; the perfect aural translation of Black Flag's unraveling-mind narratives—with a resolute aesthetic restlessness. Ginn played a game of chicken with his audience up through Black Flag's 1986 break-up and then just kept right on going, segueing into more than quarter century of self-indulgent endeavors, some intermittently inspired (Gone, Jambang, the Killer Tweeker Bees), some severely patience-testing (Mojack, Hor, El Bad), and nearly all completely ignored by both the punk orthodoxy and the jam-band and electronica scenes he began looking to for inspiration. That trend continued right up through 2012, when Ginn was still touring with the Royal We, a solo project in which he plays guitar and theremin along with minimal digi-funk backing tracks.
It's in this context that the flawed yet fascinating What The… begins to makes sense. The record's designation as a Black Flag comeback feels completely arbitrary. Sure, its contents bear a superficial resemblance to phase-one Black Flag: it is, in the most general sense, a record of brief, blaring ill-tempered punk songs. In reality, though, it's simply another Greg Ginn brainspew—the latest dispatch from a mercurial, hyperprolific genius who has never had much use for self-editing. Consider this Robert Pollard-ian statistic: on February 26, 2013, just as the Black Flag/FLAG controversy was heating up, Ginn released no fewer than three new, totally unrelated records—the latest dispatches from the Royal We and Mojack, and Life Is Too Short to Not Hold a Grudge (the debut by Good for You, Ginn's collaboration with vocalist and pro skateboarder Mike Vallely), a respectable album that serves as a more logical sequel to the final first-generation Black Flag LP, In My Head, than What The… Former Black Flag bassist Kira Roessler made the shrewdest-yet statement on Ginn's current reboot of the band when she pegged him as a perpetual "moving target" in an interview with the hardcore blog Double Cross last May. The names Ginn assigns to his projects—even something as seemingly momentous as a new incarnation of Black freaking Flag—are just details; the point is the unforgiving pace, the neverending assembly line that is his creative mind.
Still, to an extent, we have to take What The… at face value, which means considering it in the context of the existing Black Flag discography and coming to terms with why it doesn't measure up. Part of the problem is a simple human-resources issue. In the past, the band worked best when strong personalities—bassists Roessler and Chuck Dukowski, drummers Robo and Bill Stevenson, frontmen Rollins and Keith Morris—counterweighted and clashed with Ginn's snarling riffs and frayed leads, both impressively undiminished and easily the strongest features of What The… Vocalist Ron Reyes, who fronted Black Flag for a brief but fruitful period in 1979-80 turns out to be a surprisingly compelling Ginn foil. The rudimentary, uninspired rhythm section—Ginn himself on bass, appearing under the Dale Nixon pseudonym he used on My War, and his longtime collaborator Gregory "Drummer" Moore—is another story. But iffy execution isn't the main culprit. The record's greatest weakness is its stunted vision: What The… contains flashes of brilliance, but there simply aren't enough good ideas here, musical or lyrical, to sustain a 22-song, 42-minute record.
To its credit, What The… has a consistent sound and mood. It's a hectic, seemingly willfully grating album with a madcap, almost cartoonish feel, epitomized by Ginn's theremin, which turns up frequently as a kitschy accent. The style of the record might be called punk, but it's a punk that feels distinctly 90s, with loud, funky, extroverted bass and swaggery, cornily danceable cadences. (For a representative sample, spend 98 seconds with "Shut Up.") In fact, the most Black Flag-ish aspect of these songs might be the way that—in keeping with the album cover—they defy the dumbed-down caricature of the band as the quintessentially angsty first-wave hardcore outfit, opting instead for a cocky flamboyance that's at odds with the lyrics' generic harangues against fools and fakers.
As baffling as the record's aesthetic is, it yields a handful of really good songs. These make up roughly a third of the album's 22 tracks; issued as an EP, they would've made a much stronger impression than the precariously bloated package that is What The... The crowning jewel is "The Chase", an uptempo two-minute rager propelled by a series of lean, vicious Ginn riffs, each crisper and more catchy than the last. The guitarist's instrumental expression once seemed like the work of an antisocial sadist, but here, as is often the case on What The…, it registers more as the expression of an unflappable stuntman—closer to Dick Dale than Sonny Sharrock. Ginn is similarly incendiary on "Down in the Dirt", where he combines spiky eccentricity with no-nonsense rhythmic drive, illustrating anew his wizardly ability to propel a band while at the same time indulging his twisted imagination. Here, his lines act as a kind of shadow lead vocal, augmenting and enhancing Ron Reyes's squalid narrative.
Elsewhere, Reyes is the unlikely star. For much of the album, he capably portrays the malcontent manchild that is the immortal Black Flag Narrator; on certain tracks, though, he puts his own stamp on the role, summoning a histrionic swagger that's well-suited to the material. On "Now Is the Time", he practically croons, nodding to Iggy Pop's stagy baritone. During "Off My Shoulders", egged on by Ginn's raunchy crunch, he takes the act a step further, verging on Glenn Danzig's curled-lip machismo.
Convincing moments aside, the experience of listening to What The… is mostly a matter of sifting through numbing tedium in search of the next misshapen Greg Ginn pearl: the masterfully scribbly solo in "My Heart's Pumping", the noxious noise bridge in "Slow Your Ass Down", a series of strangulated stun bursts in "Lies". Ginn and Moore's rhythm section is a constant stumbling block. They have exactly two settings—a leaden half-time strut and a cowpunky double-time bounce—and zero dynamic range. The record's lopsided mix, in which a deafening field of guitar drowns out the bass and already puny-sounding drums, only foregrounds this deficiency.
Much of the musical material is equally rickety. Too many songs here feel like aggregations of quirky, tossed-off riffs. Tracks like "I'm Sick", "This Is Hell," and "Wallow in Despair" are at once so busy and so inert—borderline nauseating in their repetitiveness and indistinguishability—that their titles seem meta. As any fan of mid-to-late-period Black Flag knows, Greg Ginn has never been one to shy away from an aural staring contest; on What The…, though, the perversity of the music often sounds like the result of rushed songwriting rather than purposeful provocation.
The same is true of the lyrics. To peg them as generally bad is close to an objective statement of fact; to single out representative examples seems almost cruel. Henry Rollins shouted innumerable clunkers during his tenure in the band, but lines like this, from "Blood and Ashes," represent a new low: "Will you concede to my carnal desire?/ Or will you condemn me for what I aspire?" Then there's the spoken monologue on "Lies"—"I live with my anxiety and my angst/ I'm okay with my fear and my doubt/ It's just that I despise what you possess"—which could easily pass as a Fred Armisen-style parody of overserious hardcore. It could be the case that Ginn and Reyes are putting their listeners on throughout What The…, satirizing the staleness of punk rock's middle-finger stance. But it's more likely that the antisocial bluster Reyes yowls on "The Bitter End", "Get Out of My Way", and countless other songs here was—as much of the music on What The… seems to have been—simply the first thing that came to mind.
In a way, the saddest thing about What The... isn't its glaring shortcomings; it's the fact that, in spots, the record shows real potential. The handful of strong songs have heart and spunk and direction—about as much as one could hope for from the renewed collaboration of two ornery vets such as Ginn and Reyes. Given some time to jell, this version of the band might've eventually developed its own special chemistry, added its own wrinkle to Black Flag's convoluted timeline. But in light of Reyes's departure, What The... will forever be remembered as a stillborn curiosity, a memento of the year that the Black Flag legacy exploded.
It'll be interesting to see what Ginn's next move is, but chances are, whether he's operating under the Black Flag name or one of his countless other brands, his M.O. isn't going to change much. (Case in point: on the same day as What The... drops, Ginn's SST imprint is re-releasing the Good for You LP with no fewer than 29 bonus tracks.) Will the inevitable meteoric thrills be worth the equally inevitable stretches of boredom and bafflement? That's for each listener to decide. Just as it always has, this target keeps on moving.
