Album Review: Local H - Lifers

Even before I lived in Illinois, I had a warm gooey spot in my heart reserved for Local H. Singer, bandleader, and songwriter Scott Lucas always seemed to give his music a highly personal quality, something that I found relatable in my wayward years growing up in a cloistered Midwestern town. One not dissimilar from the one Lucas came up in, Zion, IL. What I found most relatable about them in those formative years, what their angst. To say that Local H is angsty is like pointing out the fact that teen boys love professional wrestling. Because, of course they do. And like Local H's angst, teen boys will put you in a headlock just about every chance that they get. It's not just their angst that defines Local H, though. Rather, it's the intensity with which they feel it, and the earnestness with which they communicate it, that makes the difference. Listening to a Local H album can be like getting an awful sunburn. You can feel your skin sizzling during your initial listen, but it's too hot to tell just how badly you're being burnt until hours later, when you realize just how long their slapping hooks have continued to roll through your brain after you've turned the record off. The prick of each of Lucas's stinging societal observations, pinching you ever so often as you move throughout your day, reminding you of their impact on your perception, chaffing just around the neck and under the color of your shirt.

I confess that I hadn't been keeping up with Local H since they released the superb and biting, double album polemic, Hallelujah! I'm a Bum, named after a depression-era (ok, the PREVIOUS depression-era) film starring Al Jolson. I was going through some life changes in 2015 and music stopped being my priority at that time. Hence why I slept on Hey, Killer. I'm glad that I'm back at a point in my life again where I can truly appreciate their most recent effort, Lifers.

Like most Local H albums, Lifers has a thesis. Namely, that there comes a time in everyone's life when their future gets locked into place. There comes a time when your destiny has been written by your past and your circumstances, and the world around you has closed in and barricaded off paths that you had naively thought would always be open to you. Whoever you are at that time. Whatever you're doing. That's you. That's you until they put you in the ground. The final chapter of your life has been written and all you get to do now is turn the page and read it. If this realization doesn't make your blood boil then you simply have not grasped the enormity of it. Even a happy life, one defined by good health, material security, and consummate friendship, is only as tolerable as its momentum is assured. You lose the ability to change course or achieve some higher-end, and it all starts to feel like a sitcom rerun. Resetting each day. A cycle of familiar set pieces and plot arches. An immutable status quo of compounding purgatories. It's enough to make you want to scream. Which as luck would have it, belting out one's grievances is where Lifers excels.

Lifers breaks wide open with the strained howl, nine-iron swing, and red-zone rush of opener "Patrick Bateman," which takes perfect aim at the glassy-eyed, reptile brained "elites" who call the shots for the rest of us. The next round in the chamber is "Hold That Thought," a window shattering clasp of thunderous bass and percolating, brain-boiling grooves that decimates upon arrival and rides out with sardonic glee. The hot and slippery "Winter Western" will drown you in a flash liquesce of glacial grunge hooks, and the sober psychedelic sucker-punch of "Beyond the Valley of Snakes" will leave you wheezing through bubbles of spit as you struggle to recapture your breath. Later the dusty spark-thrower "Demon Dreams" will melt the fillings in your mouth as it crashes towards oblivion in a suicidal plunge. Lifers is comprised of the most searing hard rock I've heard in a long, long time. But it's not just rage that fuels Lifers. Reflection goads Lucas into sentimentality on the gracious and jangly acoustic folk tune "Sunday Best," which considers the debts owed from the love given by others, tender thoughts wound around a bending James Taylor-esque chord progression that would be the envy of any songwriter. The real heart of the album though is "Innocents," a track that is bathed in revelatory feedback, led by ringing guitar chords that guide the listener into a kind of baptismal journey through seven circles of lonely nights, crushing regret, and deferred dreams, to come out the other side, a stronger, if greyer, version of oneself. The hardest lesson one can learn is how to live with themselves in what little time they have on this little waterlogged space rock. Everyone is scraping by in the same open-air prison. Living may be a life sentence with no parole, but eventually, your time will be up. But recognizing this fact means that you don't have to serve out your sentence in solitary isolation. I like to think that with each new Local H release, I get to know Lucas and Co. a little better. Or at least, after listening to Lifers, I feel like they already know me.

Get a copy of Lifers from AntiFragil Music, here.