Veruca Salt
Eight Arms to Hold You (Outpost/ Geffen)
by Barbara Restaino
“Daddy, I want the new Veruca Salt CD.” Not only is it a not-so-clever Willy Wonka reference, but it bears great similarity to a whine I overheard in a New Jersey mall record store the other day from the pouty mouth of a pre-pubescent adolescent girl wearing (no joke) a blue plastic miniskirt, browsing through the pop/rock section, commanding her father to buy her this CD. The episode biased me towards thinking Eight Arms to Hold You (also the working title of the Beatles’ Help! ) would be your typical teenage alterna-album: angry/woeful vocals, punky guitars, happy pop melodies.
Okay, so Veruca Salt has all of these, and I like the combination, but that’s pretty much all they had on their first album, American Thighs (you remember, “Can’t fight the seether… SEETHER!”). Last year they realized purebred punk wasn’t their schtick on Blow It Out Your Ass, It’s Veruca Salt , a four-song EP produced by Steve Albini. So what do you do when your band sounds like a million other indie bands and you pine for a better audience than obsessed eighth-grade girls and drooling boys (any age)? First you suck it up, then you spit it out, revealing some passion in your anger and meaning in your woe, finding some rock ‘n’ roll in your grunge, and adding some harmony to bolster those happy melodies.
The Verucas did some spring cleaning, finally locating the album-polish for Eight Arms to Hold You in their garage, and the result is a more cohesive album. They moved to Geffen-affiliated label Outpost and recruited veteran metal producer Bob Rock to give the album some saber-teeth. Yeah, Nina Gordon and Louise Post are still gooey in their singing and songwriting on sprightly songs like “Awesome” and “With David Bowie” (bouncy refrains, choppy piano, overuse of the word “awesome”). These, along with other tracks, such as “Sound of the Bell,” have an ’80s pop feel, like the Go Go’s meet the Wonder Stuff meet the Romantics in a ’90s mosh pit. But as a whole, the band explores stormier musical thoughts, and the most surprising evolution is the metal-hard, gnarled guitars that give a serrated edge to songs like “Shutterbug” and “Earthcrosser.”
The most recent Veruca-change is the replacement of drummer Jim Shapiro with Stacey Jones, former drummer of another Breeders-like band, Boston’s Letters to Cleo. And to answer the teenybopper question, “So, like who is this seether anyway?” Nina sings on “Volcano Girls,” the first single off the new album: “I’ve told you about the seether before/you know the one that’s neither or nor/well here’s another clue if you please/the seether’s Louise.” Funny, I thought it was Paul.
