Soul Asylum
Hurry Up And Wait
If you want it, they still got it.
Seems like a weird time for a new Soul Asylum album to come along, quite frankly. Here we are, midpandemic, hurtling helplessly and hopelessly into a strange new world – one that will be largely unrecognisable to the one we knew before. Will there be a place for Soul Asylum’s warm, plaintive, ragged optimism there? Or is it all gonna be grubby leather, gas masks and Motörhead from here on in?
For the most part, Hurry Up And Wait is a very solid album, full of chiming, heartfelt melodic rock, with faint whispers of their 80s rough-’n’-ready Minnesota alt.rock roots rattling around the edges. There are songs about feelin’ pretty good and basking in the summer sunshine, shit we used to take for granted but now seems like something Martians do. Most of us haven’t been out of the house in weeks. On first blush, it all seems pretty naive. But let us not forget how out-of-nowhere the rapid and furious ascent of 1993’s Runaway Train was. Nobody, not even Soul Asylum, imagined they’d be kissing the upper echelon of the Billboard charts, or gaining ground on Aerosmith on MTV. Christ, a year before that they were just a bunch of Midwestern wastrels with dirty hair hoping to cash in on their baby-brother relationship with The Replacements.
If Soul Asylum are about anything, they’re about infinite possibility. And so is this album.
Frontman Dave Pirner’s knack for writing essentially perfect radio-rock songs has not abated over time; the chorus on If I Told You is a diamond-hard nugget that sounds like you’ve been humming along to it for decades. Make Her Laugh is a bittersweet wonder of power-pop alchemy, Landmines a welcome return to their punchier 80s roots, and Silent Treatment sounds like the logical and thematic follow-up to Runaway Train.
It doesn’t all work, of course. Pirner’s penchant for the maudlin and the rainsoaked always threatens to spill over into sugary mush, and that’s exactly what Social Butterfly is, an overwrought poprock ballad that’s actually painful to listen to. So is Dead Letter, a weird zig-zag into folk rock that sounds like a highschooler’s most indulgent New Model Army fantasy. These are minor quibbles, though, and certainly Soul Asylum have earned their indulgences at this point. Overall, Hurry Up And Wait fits nicely into the alt.lite groove they created with 98’s Candy From A Stranger, and who wouldn’t want to revisit 1998 right now? ■■■■■■■■■■ Sleazegrinder