Just say yes
Kurt Cobain’s favourite haute couture riffmeisters return. By Keith Cameron.
Urge Overkill
★★★★ Oui
OMNIVORE. CD/DL/LP
THE FIRST Urge Overkill album in over 10 years opens, bewilderingly, with Wham!’s fluff-pop smash Freedom, lightly amped into a ’90s TV theme. Elevating what resembles a bonus track into pole position feels especially odd given UO’s prior experience of being eclipsed by an incongruous cover version, when the Midwest trio’s 1992 take on Neil Diamond’s Girl You’ll Be A Woman Soon got Pulp Fictionalised.
But perhaps the George Michael song has special resonance for Urge’s erstwhile estranged frontmen. “You could take me to hell and back/Just as long as we’re together” sums up Nash Kato and King Roeser’s turbulent 30-year creative liaison, now resumed following a low-profile decade. 2011’s Rock & Roll Submarine yielded solid enough returns 15 years after the band’s messy split, but Oui seems more energised by the participants’ real-time perspective than simply emulating the glitz and glory of 1993’s
Saturation. Notwithstanding the continued absence of beloved drummer Blackie Onassis, the warm, brittle groove of A Necessary Evil palpably reconnects us with the same people who emerged from the narcotic wreckage of 1995’s Exit The Dragon: definitely older, possibly wiser, hearts still intact. “It’s killing me, but that’s all right,” quavers Roeser, his vulnerable croon nourished by a goat’s head soup of creamy guitar and electric piano.
UO’s co-leaders have learnt that they offer more together than apart. The rampaging Follow My Shadow, a shotgun shack-up between Creedence and Cheap Trick, has them trading lines and eventually fusing into one voice, an exhortatory Urge classic to file alongside The Kids Are Insane or Positive Bleeding. As befits the accretion of life experience, the pair’s complementary roles interweave: rakish Kato gets rueful on Totem Pole (“Perhaps I shoulda lived more like some kinda family man/It grounds you, or so I’ve been told”), while Forgiven, a flarednostril blast of Some Girls swagger, sees Urge’s self-proclaimed ‘quiet person’ Roeser channelling AC/DC, Led Zeppelin and the Stones all in the same song.
Between them, King and Nash have imbibed enough soul, punk and classic rock to patent their own radio format. URGE FM peaks here with A Prisoner’s Dilemma, a horn-flecked slab of minutely orchestrated Steely Dan boogie that’s Kato’s prurient take on the case of Amanda Knox (“In them Tuscan hills/You can’t buy a thrill”). The moodswings coalesce for an elegiac final stretch, with Litany back on Exit
The Dragon’s uneasy street (“Everybody knows he’s afraid of dying alone”) and the spare, edgy Snow a spooked closer.
No lesser authority than Chrissie Hynde once described Urge Overkill as “the gallant men of rock”. Longtime fans will certainly appreciate the old-fashioned courtesy of a comeback album that honours the group’s mythology and wears its flaws honestly, yet also feels authentically present and still dares to dream. “Let’s go, the future’s calling and it’s looking alright,” they proclaim on Follow My Shadow. c’est magnifique.