That Handsome Devil - A City Dressed in Dynamite

Genre rock Publisher Modern Savage Recordings

A City Dressed in Dynamite is the first release on Modern Savage Recordings from That Handsome Devil, a Boston-grown, now New York-based outfit that owes much of its notoriety to the appearance of “Elephant Bones,” from its eponymous 2006 EP, on the soundtrack of Guitar Hero II.  (Fittingly, “Rob the Prez-O-Dent,” from this latest album, will be a playable track in Rock Band II.  So THD continues to pioneer a marketing strategy that we should see plenty more of.)

THD makes what frontman Godforbid calls “fringe pop.”  This is his name for his catchy and occasionally invigorating fusion of metal riffs, hip hop beats, and funky bass, a blend that is groovy enough to be danceable, and yet melodically flexible enough to admit touches of everything from surf rock to wailing spaghetti-western trumpets to gypsy jazz.  Godforbid’s loony, growling delivery owes a great deal to Tom Waits, but THD’s deeper ties are to the haywire eclecticism of Danger Mouse and early Beck: sculptors of the junk heap who make noises by banging on other people’s trash.

As with Beck, the abundance and peculiarity of THD’s talent can be most evident when those talents misfire.  (“Kiss the Cook” isn’t an especially distinguished addition to the ranks of bitter, mournful rap songs about the human toll of crack cocaine, but it may be the first to make use of the bass clarinet.)  And as with Beck, THD can be at its most exciting and original precisely when its musical kleptomania is at its most feverish.  The best track on City, “Viva Discordia,” features two thefts from Waits: first, Waits’ horrible phlegm-gargling laugh; second, the demented ukulele clunk of Waits’ Django-in-hell sound.  It’s the rap cousin to Waits’ “Kommienezuspadt,” and on the playful strength of Godforbid’s vocal, it’s a blast.  You’ll know you’re in good hands around the moment when he rhymes “smokin’ on a Newport” with “runnin’ through the food court.”

As an MC, Godforbid shares with Andre 3000 a gift for inspired mispronunciation.  He stretches vowels, mangles or ignores consonants, ranges in and out of a handful of cartoonish regional accents.  Unlike Ludacris or Eminem, he doesn’t try to gun you down with his rhymes.  Actually he doesn’t rhyme much at all.  He’s a master not of rhyme but near-rhyme, squeezing the closest possible thing to a rhyme out of words that never rhymed before.  Take the case of “Mona from Sedona, Arizona,” who “drove to California in a beat-up Toyota / readin’ Deepak Chopra / singin’ ‘Champagne Supernova’”—isn’t it wonderful that someone has given us a way to dance to that?

The album works best when it stays in the ecstatic mode.  As long as THD keeps itself moving faster than the speed of musical criticism, we can pass off its occasional political-smelling lyric as just a bit of performative free-association (“Heavy metal concert / in the yellow Mazda / Jell-O shots and marijuana / Goin’ off to war now / for a bunch of mobsters / lookin’ for Osama bin La-da-da-da-da-da-da-da…”).  When THD slows down to say something serious, and lets our scrutiny keep pace with the sound, scrutiny gets impatient.  Just who are these hippies, in “Reagan’s Children,” who “all have scattered off / to work their jobs at Microsoft”?  I don’t know.  But mostly I was too busy tapping my toe to care.