Panel from Slave Girl Comics issue #2, April 1949
I haven't even started, but you can already tell I'm not a true Husker Du fan. How? I don't do the umlauts, and I'm sorry about that. I don't have a key for them on my keyboard. Well, here's a brief anecdote that also shows how I'm not a true Husker Du fan - I had a friend in high school that would lend me CDs from time to time, in an attempt to broaden my horizons. He lent me a copy of Warehouse:Songs and Stories at one point, and I hated it. I remember telling him that the songs all sounded the same, and how they sounded was terrible. No choruses, no hooks, no appeal.
What album was I listening to? When I came back around to Husker Du just in this last decade, I was shocked to find that a lot of people say that Grant Hart was the band's best songwriter. I had always assumed that Bob Mould (whose solo and Sugar albums I owned) was the front-man and real songwriter in the band. So I went out and bought New Day Rising and, sure enough, Hart's songs were my immediate favorites. And now, listening to Warehouse:Songs and Stories again almost two decades later, I'm hearing a totally different record. Maybe because, this time around, I'm expecting the drums to sound like wet Wheaties boxes being hit with thawed Ball Park franks - I understand now that that's part of the Husker Du charm.
Husker Du's final album, Warehouse is an album everyone knows about, so there's little I can say about it. It's twenty songs by two great songwriters who were totally sick of each other, it's a very impressive, emotion-filled songwriting showcase. At almost 70 minutes, it somehow doesn't seem long, and (most surprisingly to me) Bob Mould's songs here are finally what I always thought his Husker Du tracks would sound like. There are still some of the angsty Mould numbers more common to earlier Huskers' records ("Visionary", "Bed of Nails"), but most of his tracks are virtually flawless power-pop with amazing hooks. Interestingly, Hart's tracks mostly sound phoned-in to me on Warehouse - sure, "She Floated Away" is the album's best song and "You Can Live at Home" is a great closer, unlike anything else in the Husker Du discography, but the other tracks just kind of sit there. And they don't shine in the your-song-my-song setup of Warehouse - for example, "You're a Soldier" is an okay Hart song, but it comes right after Mould's "Ice Cold Ice", which uses almost the exact same hook in a much better way.
Some people say that the last quarter of Warehouse sputters out, but it's really the best part of the album - I think that the last five songs might be my favorites, particularly Mould's "Up in the Air" and "Turn It Around". The latter song in particular is great to me for that moment where Hart switches up the rhythm unexpectedly and Mould sings a great new melodic hook. I owe my old friend Amir an apology - I wonder what he thought of me when I told him that this album has no hooks?
"Turn It Around" by Husker Du
2 comments:
I played the hell out of this when it came out, but over time the Husker Du that has really stuck with me is the Zen Arcade / New Day Rising era, not the later poppier stuff. Still lots of great songs here, though.
This was the first CD (as opposed to LP) I ever bought - I bought it on CD because getting a 2xLP on one CD was a better deal! By the way, on the LPs there's a side break between "Ice Cold Ice" and "You're a Soldier", which might help ameliorate the running order issue you mention.
Thanks for pointing out that "Ice Cold Ice" and "You're a Soldier" were on different sides on the LP - it makes a lot of sense. It seemed like such blatantly bad sequencing, and I couldn't figure it out.
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