I remember when New Wet Kojak were still but a humble side project toiling in the shadow of Girls Against Boys, a smoother, slinkier sideshow to GVSB's rumbling main event. That was, however, eight years ago, and a lot has changed since then. GVSB tanked on the utterly plastic and lifeless Freakonica way back in 1998, and they've only just begun to regain any steam with last year's slight return You Can't Fight What You Can't See. Meanwhile, New Wet Kojak have released a string of great albums, to the point where they're now even more consistent than GVSB ever were.
This Is the Glamorous is the band's fourth full-length since vocalist Scott McCloud and bassist Johnny Temple began seeing other people, and it's definitely got a shinier wax job than any of their previous albums, but where their other band was choked nearly to death by overproduction, this one fairly thrives on it. McCloud could hardly be described as melodic, but his distinctive declamations sound fantastic in New Wet Kojak's greasy-haired soup of thumping backbeat, laser synth and freaky sax.
The band rides in triumphantly on the kinetic guitar and blorping bass of "The World of Shampoo", with Charles Bennington's harmonized sax channeling Morphine's Dana Colley and McCloud's slightly gruff sing-speak riding easily in the fore. "Supermodel Citizens USA" is positively anthemic by this band's standards, surging in its choruses on the back of some great guitar and piling on the tension in the verses until it becomes almost overpowering.
With its fat bassline and cloud of sax, "Nothing You Can Say" picks up the Morphine ball and runs with it, piling on electronics for good measure, but Bennington's best moments come amidst the whooping synth noises and rock-steady rhythms of "Something Easy". His sax burns on multiple tracks in the background, some of them distorted, others writhing in free jazz ecstasy. It's been said in these pages multiple times before (including once in reference to this very band) that the sax is definitely due for a comeback in rock. If you require evidence of that claim, just check out the songs I just mentioned, or the record's closer "Reverse the Curse", which overflows with a rich sax arrangement that absolutely makes the song.
There are a few curious moments on This Is the Glamorous that make me wonder if this project is starting to run out of ideas, chief among them being "Jealous". The album title originally appeared in the band's catalog three years ago in a line from "The Overkill", the second song on the excellent Do Things. Strangely, the band recycles the line over and over in "Jealous" here, which is odd, because the phrase really doesn't mean much to begin with.
Thankfully, though, the band remains utterly conscious of their own sleazy/scenester come-on schtick, as evidenced by the nonchalantly delivered lyrics of "Let's Get Glorified", where a bored-sounding McCloud offers, "I hear you're hanging out/ And stuff/ Hanging out/ Et cetera/ Doing a lot of bad things." It's as though he wants to care, but can't quite bring himself to. So let the word go out, good people: New Wet Kojak are still in the game. This Is the Glamorous isn't their best (that's still Nasty International), but it's a solid entry into the canon of a surprisingly long-lived band, one that seems destined to outlive its own roots.
