For a band that emerged with such a deeply ingrained reverence for pre-rock 'n' roll tradition and authenticity, the Boggs managed to instantly date themselves on the cover of their 2002 debut album, We Are The Boggs We Are, by having a member hold up a prop magazine with the Strokes on the front. Of course, the real joke was that the music on the album sounded less the product of New York 2002 than Mississippi 1932. But now, five years and three albums later, that cheeky gesture seems doubly ironic: With Forts, the Boggs sound like a band that's finally made peace with the modern world-- and they've even got the Liars connections and Hot Chip remix to prove it.
The ultimate irony is that Boggs mainman Jason Friedman-- the group's lone constant-- had to move to Berlin to sound more like a Brooklynite. But where his fellow Brooklyn-to-Berlin émigrés Liars have taken a turn toward the insular since their 2005 relocation, Friedman's songwriting-- once tethered to a marble-mouthed drawl and droning resonator-guitar slides-- has become more approachable, and more open to influences beyond Harry Smith box sets. You could hear the tentative first steps toward transformation on 2003's uneven (and, due to label woes, hard-to-find) Stitches, but it seemingly took a move overseas to completely shake Friedman of his aesthetic purism. Recorded with assistance from Liars' Julian Gross and SchneiderTM's Christian Obermaier, Forts scrapes away the Boggs' surface grime and puts the emphasis-- as all good rock 'n' roll should-- on rhythm.
But these are not the double-time dust-ups that defined the early Boggs: Forts is a combustible concoction of hand-claps, knee-slaps, Bo Diddley beats, shuffling feet, clinking cowbells, and chain-gang chants that suggests a band perpetually on the verge of breaking down but having too good a time to notice the smoke seeping out from under the hood. On the opening title track, a tapped-out hand-jive pulse is echoed by a click-and-cut techno-dub backtrack-- effectively condensing 60 years of dance-music history into 20 seconds-- while the song's crystalline acoustic guitar riff almost sounds computer-triggered. But where the Boggs' current live incarnation features two drummers to give a song like "Forts" the extra wallop it seems to demand, on record, Friedman prefers to twitch in the tension, shouting above the din and nudging the song along like he's trying to get off a crowded subway.
The Boggs' earlier efforts sometimes blurred the line between aesthetic purity and monotony, but Forts shifts gears frequently and effectively enough to avoid any such accusations. Freed from the affected drawl he once relied upon, Friedman's voice is something of a blank slate-- and not always in the cool-Lou-Reed-monotone kinda way-- so he was wise to enlist vocalist foil Karen Sharky, who ably plays the Exene to his John Doe, and who lends ample color to a band that once existed in grainy black and white. It's nigh impossible to imagine the Boggs of 2002 attempting a B-52s-styled call-and-response like "Remember the Orphans", a cheeky Buddy Holly cop like "Little Windows", or the Gary Glittered swing of "Arm in Arm" (recent recipient of the aforementioned Hot Chip makeover), but Forts is less a slide-show of genre tourism than a natural reflection of roots music's historic evolution through jump blues ("Bookends"), rockabilly ("So I So You") and punk ("If We Want (We Can)", a clattering noise-blues outburst that shows Liars aren't just friends, but inspirations).
Beyond the rhythmic ticks, what keeps the Boggs from degenerating into standard-issue blues-rock is Friedman's unconventional approach to rock's defining instrument: He beats on his acoustic guitar like it's electric, while plucking his electric guitar strings as if they were acoustic. Forts succeeds so long as the Boggs stay busy; Friedman isn't commanding enough a singer to carry more relaxed, unadorned folky fare like "After the Day" on his own, and the ominous, dirgey ballad "The Passage" threatens to cross the line from mid-album breather to buzz-kill. Like Dylan before him-- another folk adherent who eventually stopped worrying and learned to love the rock-- Friedman sounds most comfortable playing the role of song-and-dance man.
