I'm not exactly sure why, but it's been a damn long time since I just sat back and enjoyed a balls-out rock record. For some reason, mingling with heavy riffage and wild drum fills just didn't seem that appealing last year. But absence, as they say, makes the heart grow fonder, and lately I've been craving rock with an "a" and a "w" in doses far greater than I can ever remember. Enter Major Fables, the third album from Boston quintet The Lot Six. Packing raw throats, a triple-guitar phalanx and several more beats per minute than your average rockers, The Lot Six manage to merge punk rage and energy with classic rock flair that does away with prefixes and pretense and gets right to the point.
"Autobrats" bucks its way out of the gate with a crusty but melodic riff and flails like mad for 3\xBD minutes, lead vocalist David Vicini vigorously contributing more mass to the polyps that no doubt coat his vocal cords by now. Blasts of fuzzy bass face off against whirling, skritchy guitars that nod to Fugazi and Drive Like Jehu on "No UFO's", which also has drummer Lawrence Sinclair royally abusing his toms in the spastically shouted chorus.
It's not all wild hammer-ons and buzzsaw axe interplay, though, as some funky tack piano finds its way into "I Was You" courtesy of guitarist Julian Cassanetti, who also handles trombone on the song. The track bounces through its verses, Vicini trading his shout for a wayward croon and then trading it back for some outlandish outbursts on the chorus. "X-Rayted" bursts with three-chord Kinks riffs, and Vicini goes totally Ian MacKaye on us on "Out of Control" with his wildly shouted refrain of, "Ordinary everyday people ought to stay that way."
Things only really slow down twice on Major Fables-- once for the pastiche country of "My Baby's Gone", which comes complete with closing time harmonies and a bit of slide guitar from Apollo Sunshine's Sam Cohen; and once again for the more ambitious and less tongue-in-cheek "Go to Sleep", whose slow-motion ska groove is damn tedious. Which is unfortunate, because these guys do some of their best work at their most ambitious; last year's Animals is still their best album precisely because it aimed high. Major Fables may be more focused and consistent, but it's also less compelling as a result. That the band appears to be retreating here from a more expansive approach is a shame.
Still, this album is a taut blast of muscle-bound rock with enough brains to lodge a bevy of splintered riffs and shouted hooks in yours. When the bone-headed punk of closer "Die Polizei" ends things on a ragged, delirious note, it puts the cap on a satisfyingly rough-and-tumble collection of songs that, while failing to constitute a masterpiece, will nonetheless give your adrenal glands a swift kick.
