The Old Haunts
Poisonous Times
Kill Rock Stars
By Jose Fritz
I was so pissed off at myself. I had wasted a few hours mollified by public television and eating dry cereal. Old Haunts came to Philly two years ago and I didn’t go. I knew they were coming to Philly, but then I figured out they were playing a house party our near Drexel and I actually decided I wasn’t in the mood to hang with drunk-ass college paste eaters. I should have sucked it up, gone and pulled up some wall in the back. Regret is a bad motherfucker.
For me it was the single song “Poison Control,” and it was an entirely new idea. They were messy like Scratch Acid but pounding like the Meat Puppets. It was truly an amazing track, one that outshone the contents of their first two albums.
Fuel on Fire and Fallow Field weren’t that great. Aside from the phononymic similarity each album only had a few strong tracks. Songs like “Paradise” and “Death on the Sickbed” stank of a few good men lashing out at new ideas they could smell in the dark but not yet see. Kill Rock Stars hung in there, maybe it was a contractual obligation or maybe it was proselytized belief, but they did. I prefer to think that we both saw the same thing coming —the back alley change of clothes, pants copped from the laundromat, a coat stolen from the neighbor’s line, shoes from the Baptists, all culminating in an unpredictable change of concomitance. And they delivered!
Having potential is an ugly kind of burden. If you never accede to greatness you’re a total failure, hated and derided in print. You’re an almost-been, a one-hit wonder and just a single on a mix tape. If you achieve it, then you’re just obeying the law of gravity as if the effort and dedication were worth nothing just some inertial force. Now, Old Haunts creep yet closer, teasing the writers, fans and rubbernecking gossip mongers.
As was to be expected, they burned out another drummer on the road and have brought us another sacrificial young thing. In a twisted way, he leads them backward out of their muddy Mudhoney-ish take on rock. The already sparse, deliberate rhythms become almost primitive á la Meg White here. Poisonous Times gets downright bluesy in places. In that journey, Craig Extine sometimes resembles a young Lonnie Donegan, the king of skiffle. By the middle of “Not Hopeless” I half-expect them to swerve into a breakneck punk rock version of “The Midnight Special.” Their formerly rounded bass tones are now dressed in the gothic layers of polished wool suits and analog distortion. It adds a dirty low end in new places making them further resemble The Wipers who already influence them so.
This progression is a conversion, ascension maybe even an acceptance of what they are truly capable of. It’s their finest work yet and as a rubbernecking gossip monger I look on eagerly.
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