The Inevitable Backlash – My Two Brookes

My Two Brookes is a hungry album by a band hungry for authenticity, a band whose consignment to the bottom of the barrel — the Buzz Bin at best — becomes, by empty dialectical reversal, a point of pride. Muddy production? How Albini did it, son. Forgettable choruses? Not writing pop songs here. The record is a heartless slog: macho vocals, questionable outlooks on the women that surround them, and bitterly self-conscious traipsing in and out of the rock-cliché minefield. It’s a protracted rationalization: defeat masquerading as separate peace.

The band’s name alone, of course, signals a fascination — maybe curious, probably anxious — with cycles of influence and acceptance. Fine: more consciousness, not less. But the cynicism, the knowingness they peddle meets no valid resonance on the level of content. The Inevitable Backlash don’t challenge or distort a single received understanding in 30 minutes — feels like at least 60 — and even a peppier cut such as “Diego Rivera” devolves into a risible jam session. All in the noble pursuit of “dirty, bass filled [sic], [sic] East LA rock n’ [sic] roll.”

Premised on a meaningless, contentless category, the quest results in a record entirely without qualities: neither beautiful nor filthy, lilting nor urgent, bizarre nor pummelingly mechanical. Mild Pixies mimesis — on “Diego Rivera,” “Moscow Bride,” and sporadically throughout — reaches no logical conclusion, and John Renton’s watery timbre isn’t suited to the heavy lifting he attempts.

But, inevitably, the perpetrators’ operating principle is to expunge the possibility of criticism, indeed of any productive vantage point outside their limp language game: “So real,” they whimper, to no one in particular. “So good.”