Saturday, October 19, 2024

MC5 - Heavy Lifting

You gotta laugh at the fact Heavy Lifting is tagged as ‘Explicit’.  That advice seems superfluous, when MC5’s most famous moment was arguably when singer Rob Tyner bawled “Kick Out The Jams, motherfuckers!” on their 1969 live album.  Whaddya expect – a cocktail party?
Of course, the MC5 that recorded Heavy Lifting was very different from the 1969 line-up, the original members reduced to just guitarist Wayne Kramer and (on a couple of tracks) drummer Dennis Thompson.  And sadly both of them died earlier this year before the album was released, as did manager, guru and rebel John Sinclair.  So a good deal of the heavy lifting in the making of this recorded involved big-hitting guest musos like Tom Morello, Slash, Don Was (who supplied much of the bass playing) and many more, under the supervision of producer Bob Ezrin.
Wayne Kramer flies the flag for MC5
But the spirit of the original Motor City demons is alive and well when ‘Heavy Lifting’ itself limbers up with a helter-skeltering riff and ooh-ing harmonies, before erupting out of the starting gate with a crunching riff reinforced by trampolining bass.  The vocal – I’m guessing courtesy of Brad Brooks, Kramer’s co-writer across most of the 13 tracks – is an aggressive, near-ranting rap, and the guitar break is a skewering thrust.  They follow that up with ‘Barbarians At The Gate’, a hot-rails-to-hell tirade directed at the Trump-obsessed January 6 riots.  It’s all clattering drums, high octane guitars and throaty hollering, with a fierce chorus boosted by a neck-snapping ‘Problem Child’-like riff, and concludes with a Catherine Wheel showdown of sparks-flying guitar and harp.
There’s more of this kinda thing further down the line, with the (un)steady as she goes lurching groove of  ‘Black Boots’.  But Kramer and co also dig some different grooves along the way to avoid getting in a rut. ‘Change, No Change’ marries booming, blooping bass to falsetto-ish vocals, with jagged guitar/drums lightning strikes, in an off kilter slow funk groove that could be the work of Beck – and I don’t mean Jeff.  As if to show that’s no fluke, ‘I Am The Fun (Phoney)’ is another deep, behind-the-beat groove, replete with squeaking, blinking, bleeping guitar intrusions, and a chorus that puts me in mind of Parliament’s ‘Give Up The Funk (Tear The Roof Off The Sucker)’.  Hell, they even take Edwin Starr’s ‘Twenty-Five Miles’ Motown hit and rock it up with heavy duty guitars welded to its chunky, funky undercurrent.
There are more echoes of Beck on the loping ‘Blessed Release’, with its edgy, semi-slurring vocals and gritty undercurrent of stuttering guitar over a steady beat and bursts of shaker, and the closing ‘Hit It Hard’ edges closer to the realm of Prince with its loose-limbed guitar, bass’n’drums bump’n’grind, enhanced by horns and squawking female backing vocals, all coming together in a chant-along chorus and pulling in an elasticated bass break and searing sax from Joe Berry en route to the closing line of “When it comes to love baby, we’re all equal here”.
But there’s also a run of tracks that seem less intense, starting with the strutting ‘Because Of Your Car’, which edges towards the twisted-relationship territory of Alice Cooper, but with keening, double-tracked vocals and infected with a slinky Isaac Hayes soul groove.  Then ‘Boys Who Play With Matches’, ‘Blind Eye’ and ‘Can’t Be Found’ – the latter pair featuring Thompson on drums - seem like throwbacks to the garage rock origins of the original MC5.  If these power-popping tunes came from a different artist I dare say I’d like ‘em big time, but here the rough edges have been sanded down just a bit too much to fit – though ‘Can’t Be Found’, with its turbo-charged chorus and guitar solo, eventually ramps up the desired energy.
But I reckon the last word has to go to ‘The Edge Of The Switchblade’. This fist-pumping tribute to the 5’s heyday blasts in with a yelled ‘Alright!’ and whips up a storm of hard-rocking rambunction.  It’s an irresistible, guitar-squalling (Slash takes a bow here), hey-hey-hey-ing call to arms, proclaiming that “On the cutting edge you might get cut, that’s the chance you have to take”.
Wayne Kramer and his buddies were right on the cutting edge back in the day, and did indeed get cut.  It’s debatable whether Heavy Lifting is really and truly an MC5 album, when band members Rob Tyner, Fred ‘Sonic’ Smith and bassist Michael Davis are long gone.  But I tell you what, it’s a pretty shit hot homage to the band’s memory.

Heavy Lifting
 is out now on earMUSIC.

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