In Lizzy Goodman’s 2017 oral history Meet Me in the Bathroom: Rebirth and Rock and Roll in New York City 2001-2011, Nic Offer, who’s spent the 21st century hosting party monsters !!! across eight albums and many more singles, talks about looking back. “Each decade pays for the sins of the last,” he says. He’s talking about the way the grunge and rave of the 1990s sought to counter the stadium rock and dance pop of the 1980s with what he called “a new sort of slickness,” a kind of trashy authenticity.
Over the years !!! have countered the po-faced myopia of the early 2000s with their own trashy authenticity. They slapped a dad-joke patch on mom-jeans funk to critique the police state with “Me and Giuliani Down by the School Yard (A True Story).” They’ve again and again ordered up the ugliest sleeves that their label, hero-to-all-your-designer-friends Warp, has ever approved. They turned one of the Magnetic Fields’ best songs, a conflicted invocation of MDMA as a psychic and physiological bulwark against homophobic violence, into affable coffee-shop disco, then turned Stereolab’s Marxist-feminist French disko into Brooklyn boys’ noise with a live cover band, Stereolad.
They’ve done it all with an accomplished, if ironic, panache. But Wallop begins with a great whooshing sound, like a sort of time travel, and indeed this solid collection is a change of course: a serious embrace of the sounds of the ’90s, an attempt to come to grips with that “new sort of slickness.” Opener “Let It Change U” is a cocky hulk that could’ve waddled onto an early Chemical Brothers or mid-career Beastie Boys album; the titular it is, of course, rhythm. The next track, “Couldn’t Have Known,” cuts acoustic guitars and stuttering breaks into a nod to Akufen’s 2002 barnstormer “Deck the House,” one of the first tracks of the new millennium that, with its kaleidoscopic cut-up of country licks, R&B runs, and a million other bits of cultural detritus, really sounded like the future.
Bookends in place, the rest of Wallop fills in the ’90s timeline. “Off the Grid” gathers Liars’ Angus Andrew and longtime !!! co-vocalist Meah Pace for a roiling bit of nihilism. “Get up, it’s here/You’ve got to start to assume/The end is near/And not a moment too soon,” they chant. It’s like Primal Scream covering “1999” in 1999. Like a few other tracks, it dissolves into a dubbed coda (“In the Grid”) that’s just long enough to make you wonder what a No Protection or Echo Dek-style version might achieve, yet not long enough to demonstrate it. But then in crashes “Serbia Drums,” built off a riff drummer Chris Egan recorded while on tour; with its crunchy guitars and DX-7 style bell melodies, it sounds about as dangerous as the dominatrix number in Showgirls. It doesn’t suck.
