Plucky, loud, and dripping with distortion, The Catheters' third full-length, Howling... It Grows and Grows!!! is deceptively alluring: Like Keith Moon's bass drum arbitrarily erupting on live national television, or Ozzy Osbourne yanking down his pants and whizzing little yellow rivers all over the Alamo, there's something vaguely impudent about The Catheters' fuzzed-out guitars, tin can production, yelpy vocals, and jolting rhythms-- and all that blind, sloppy audacity can occasionally create something stupidly appealing. Particularly at first listen.
Opener "No Natural Law" is a hopelessly twitchy introduction, unraveling at every turn, all youthful indiscretion and awkwardly squawked proclamations, tangling The Catheters up in their own popping guitar strings and beautifully explosive finishes. Their guitars buzz, the disc quivers, and, 30 seconds in, the proposition of flopping face-first into The Catheters' muddy stew is oddly inviting-- much like the ill-fated romance of garage-rock itself (see: recording on an $8 tape deck, sandwiched between lawnmowers, sacks of fertilizer and half-empty paint cans), it's easy to get swept up in The Catheters' spunky impishness, to be inadvertently seduced by something so unapologetically brash and seemingly unconcerned with its own tunefulness. Still: By three tracks in, the band's thick slams start to become numbingly repetitive, the songs grow increasingly redundant. And not much later, it becomes strikingly evident that there's little here to discern one cut from the next, and nothing at all to maintain the giddy momentum of its start.
Like nearly all fledgling garage bands, The Catheters' mine the ashes of the Stooges and the MC5 (as well as nodding to labelmates/contemporaries The Murder City Devils and Mudhoney), and Howling is a spotty mishmash of garage kickiness and metal sludge. Yet, something about the album seems prematurely and preemptively tired, and the longer the record plays, their inability to sustain significance becomes increasingly obvious. Despite all the promise of The Catheters' bluster, Howling is startlingly benign.
Ultimately, The Catheters are big on style, and troublingly low on ideas-- most of Howling's 33 minutes refries the exact same tired, neo-garage conceits, but without tweaking the components, or injecting any compelling or memorable hooks. The resulting record is sort of like a post-fire apartment: layers and layers of wet white fuzz, with nothing much of worth soaking underneath.
