Is he joking? That was what people kept asking about Andrew W.K. around the time he emerged. Chant-along pop-metal anthems about partying mixed with earnest self-help talk about living every moment to the fullest? In 2001? Given that W.K. had some serious noise-rock/art-dude pedigree (drumming for To Live and Shave in L.A., for one), the whole thing seemed like it had to be some titanic art-school prank. But then came I Get Wet, the first album that carried the A.W.K. name, and every song sounded like introductory single "Party Hard". I Get Wet is a work of impeccable production and serious craftsmanship, every chorus and key-change in its exact right place. If it was part of a joke, it was dizzily well-rendered. After that, the few years of frenzied live shows dispelled any doubts. A.W.K. would straight-up tell security to let kids surge onstage, and it's not really possible to maintain ironic distance from the bottom of a pigpile of sweaty bellowing teenagers.
So Andrew W.K. isn't a joke, never was. If anything, he's like Stephen Colbert: A character played to such perfection, for so long, that the guy playing it couldn't help but merge it with his actual self on some level. Close Calls With Brick Walls is the moment the character started to break down, where W.K.'s noise-art tendencies finally came bubbling to the surface. On the 2006 LP, W.K. followed two straight platters of revved-up stomp-and-shout with something weirder, an album that mixed his old full-speed-all-the-time persona with blurts of Frank Zappa/Mike Patton squelch-and-growl, as well as a few totally incomprehensible sound experiments.
The slow, epic, triumphant opening track "I Came for You" was exactly the sort of thing that would've led perfectly into another roaring banger. Instead, track two is "Close Calls With Bal Harbour", a 1:20 dark ambient burble, with A.W.K. intoning sinister nothings over a throbbing synth. "Dr. Dumont" is a minute of placid, eerie piano and nothing else. The entire lyrical content of "Golden Eyed Dog" is as follows: "The small golden eyed dog with the body shaped like a cat." But amid all these WTF experiments, we can hear plenty of the old A.W.K. in the form of surging, unstoppable hookfests like "One Brother", the vaguely girl-group-esque "Don't Call Me Andy", and "You Will Remember Tonight"-- the latter of which is one of the purest and best songs A.W.K. has ever written.
I spent a lot of time in 2006 listening to Close Calls without coming any closer to understanding what the hell was going on with the record. Back then, the album only saw release in Japan and Korea, possibly because of a bitter legal dispute with a former manager, and interested parties like me ended up making do with downloads. (There was also a short-lived vinyl release on Providence noise label Load, thus making Close Calls probably the hookiest album in Load history.) Now, the album is finally getting an American release, packaged along with the unreleased-material collection Mother of Mankind, and it makes at least a tiny bit more sense. Throughout Close Calls, W.K.'s basic message never varies from what it was on his two major-label albums: Live every second as if you were about to keel over and die. "Not Going to Bed" is literally about not going to bed: "Are you gonna go to sleep on the table? I'm not! Are you gonna fall asleep watching cable? I'm not!" The rest of the album, despite its stylistic left turns, basically follows suit: Big anthems about being yourself and having fun.
The Wolf, W.K.'s second album, had repeated all the same tricks as I Get Wet, to slightly diminished results. So maybe Close Calls was an attempt to musically expand in as many directions as possible, Philip Glass minimalism and Motörhead biker-boogie as well as the Zappa stuff. It's not entirely successful, partly because W.K. didn't have the same gigantic, expensive production at his disposal. (The totally disposable Mother of Mankind seems to back this up. Comprised almost entirely of budget-ass attempted party anthems, it's not the kind of thing anyone needs to hear more than twice.) But the great moments on Close Calls, "You Will Remember Tonight" in particular, remain undiminished four years later. And when you've got four or five ridiculously great songs on one album, the ill-advised noise experiment bits suddenly become a whole lot more tolerable.
