Given their track record, you'd figure that merely acknowledging the existence of a new Stereophonics album would just be piling on, but despite what you may have heard, we don't go actively searching for things to hate on-- there's hardly enough time in the day to cover all the good shit out there. I mean, who wouldn't want Pull the Pin to end up being a surprising career renaissance, and not, say, a phenomenally forgettable record so steeped in post-grunge that it's almost impossible to believe it came from Britain, in 2008? I think that score up there can tell you how it turned out.
In retrospect, it looks like these guys cast their lot with "Mr. Writer", a laughably impotent revenge fantasy that projected their own narrow-mindedness on the critics that "shoot them down." It set up an us vs. them dichotomy that's allowed the band to retreat to pleasing the diehards and somehow still stick it to scribes: no matter how many times you listen to Pull the Pin, you're still rendered nearly incapable of describing what you just heard. The only variations are laudable only for at least feigning variation-- if Built To Spill's There's Nothing Wrong With Love-ending pisstake was 300% longer and somehow half as sincere, it would be "Bright Red Star". "Daisy Lane" keeps you up to speed on recent knife violence in England (it's bad), but in doing so, picks at the same threadbare melody line for the song's entirety-- one of the oldest tricks in the Stereophonics book. By the end, you're so sapped for something memorable, that you might be willing to laud the sawtoothed guitar tone that bristles "I Could Lose Ya". That's what it comes down to-- an effect featured on literally hundreds of better albums is the star of the show.
Awful cover art and album title aside, Pull the Pin is rock in the platonic sense, cranking out distorted riffs and power chords while Kelly Jones' vox box stays caked with ashtray residue amidst song structure having the almost mesmerizing predictability of NASCAR. But it's also rock in a different sort of platonic way, as in platonic friend-- no sex, no spark. Pull the Pin might be going for the uncluttered "production" of older Rick Rubin, but instead it cops the sterility of newer Rick Rubin, each song lumbering on a chassis of waterlogged tempo and Jones' wooden melodies, begging for just about anything to grab you. Though strings and other electronics were shelved because they're, duh, not rock, Pull the Pin rarely sounds like the result of four guys jamming out in a room.
At least Language. Sex. Violence. Other? had some risible attempts at shoegazer and new wave, along with risibly confrontational lyrics. What you manage to catch here is typically lazy Jones quotes about grim alcohol abuse (the self-explanatory "Bank Holiday Monday") and conciliatory women ("I Could Lose Ya"). The former is certainly a charmer-- "The mind can be a playground if you use it /She could go down on me in a theatre." And once the dirt-dry blooze of "Soldiers Make Good Targets" begins, you half-expect him to start singing about a meatplow instead of his non-starter complaints about war (it's bad). Worse yet, "It Means Nothing", which attempts nothing short of being a Lee Greenwood anthem for London's 7/7 bombings, just makes you feel like an asshole for only remembering lines like "If the bomb goes off again/ And my brain around the train/ And I hope that I'm with you/ 'Cause I wouldn't know what to do" and "You can find yourself a god/ Believe in which one you want/ 'Cause they love you all the same/ They just go by different names." Forget the title of Pull the Pin-- it's been sex, violence, and (mostly) other since J.E.E.P.'s mid-career pit stop into lightheartedness, and at this point, Jones sounds like someone who's just gonna keep crankin' 'em out until he's able to franchise a Hooters.
