Imagine that you had made a great, enduring piece of art with a couple of your friends when you were barely out of your teens. Now imagine that it's more than 30 years later, you no longer have anything in common with your former comrades, and all anybody wants to hear from you is that one glorious burst of hormonal fury you came up with as alienated kids.
That's roughly the position in which Violent Femmes find themselves in 2016, as they release their first album of new material since 2000. Singer/guitarist Gordon Gano has recently noted that he and bassist Brian Ritchie "don't agree on most basic things", which is putting it mildly: Ritchie sued Gano in 2007, and snapped that "it is his karma that he lost his songwriting ability many years ago". Original drummer Victor DeLorenzo rejoined the group when it reunited to play Coachella 2013, but quickly left, citing "disrespect, dishonesty and greed".
Somehow, though, Gano, Ritchie and DeLorenzo's replacement, Dresden Dolls' Brian Viglione (who departed the group at the end of last year), managed to scrape together an album's worth of tunes. Some of them were resuscitated from demo tapes dating back to the era when that meant "cassettes"; three were co-written by Gano and a handful of song doctors; "What You Really Mean" is a cover of a song by Gano's sister.
The charitable way to describe We Can Do Anything is that it's a back-to-basics record: ten brief songs in the band's most immediately recognizable idiom, with Gano singing and strumming with the twitchiness of a guilty teenager, Ritchie snapping strings like he's shooting rubber bands, and Viglione's brushes smacking the hell out of a single snare drum. A less charitable perspective is that it's a pale Silly Putty copy of Violent Femmes, with the vocal and instrumental tone reprised precisely from 33 years ago. It touches on all of the Femmes' familiar themes: masturbation ("Foothills"), Christian awe ("Holy Ghost"), lady troubles ("Big Car", which starts as leaden double-entendre and becomes a leaden murder ballad in its final line). The closest thing to a deviation from the formula here is "I Could Be Anything", a beer-kegger polka (with accordion!) about a dragon-slaying hero, which seems like it's heading toward a narrative twist but never comes up with one.
Violent Femmes have spent most of their career in the shadow of their debut album. (On their 2014 tour, they played it in its entirety, and last year's gigs inevitably began with "Blister in the Sun" and "Kiss Off" and ended with "Add It Up.") But they used to get some juice out of trying to get out from under it. The most memorable recordings of their subsequent career have been the biggest departures: the industrial fever-hallucination "Machine", the holy-rolling shock-skronk of "Black Girls", the in-your-face T. Rex cover "Children of the Revolution." They're not trying to pull off anything like that any more; instead, they're polishing up the durable façade of their signature sound, while the songwriting that it used to support has crumbled.
