Liquor Giants

Every Other Day at a Time (Matador)
by Nik Rainey

Back in the days when Ward Dotson was providing chunderful backup for Jeffrey Lee Pierce’s seething blues-punk dirges and shared-needle pointillism, I sincerely doubt anyone entertained the notion that he’d wind up whipping together impressively fluffy 1966-y retro-omelets not quite two decades later, but far be it from me to grouse. (I think you need a permit to in this state anyway.) There’s nary a note on the Liquor Giants‘ Every Other Day at a Time that doesn’t trigger a sense memory of hoisting one of my parents’ old LPs onto the ol’ Sears Silvertone – it’s a multiple-exposure montage of half-recollected Turn! Turn! Turn! s and strokes,Rubber Soul bounces, and “Look Through Any Window”-dressing. (That dates me right there, I realize – what did your folks have in their collections? Frampton? The Knack?

I’m starting to understand why you kids are shooting each other so much these days…) If it weren’t for the occasional wink toward obscure referentialism or deliberately anachronistic lyrical moves (best example of both: “What’s the New Mofo,” which bases its name on a rare Beatles outtake, but uses the kind of profanity Lennon only started spewing once he started spending far too much time with Arthur Janov and Jann Wenner), you could use this CD to induce nostalgic convulsions in your average boomer (“Yep, sonny-boy, this reminds me of what was playing on the radio the evening I single-handedly sullied the gene pool and fucked up the sense of idealism of every generation to follow. It was a Thursday, if memory serves”), which would get this alb tagged with withering adjectives like “derivative” if a) it weren’t so sublime in its borrowings, and b) the statute of limitations for that word hadn’t kicked in (once a band’s source material hits five years old, it automatically reverts from “ripoff” to “homage”). Sure, you’ve heard it all before, and nah, it’s not blazing any brave new trails in rock (are there any left?), but when the tucked-away-and-uncredited period cover (the Move’s “Fire Brigade”) near the end of the disc proves inferior to the original likes of “Multicoloured Hipshake” and “I’ll Never Mind,” it’s enough to make you swear you saw that dead horse flinch.