Akimbo
Navigating the Bronze
Alternative Tentacles
Thirsty, not so miserable
Much has happened since Akimbo’s 2002 debut, Harshing Your Mellow. There’s been a few albums, a lot of lineup changes, a filthy-as-a-Taco Bell-bathroom reissue and probably about 10,000 beers. Seriously. Five years, 2,000 beers a year, 5.5 beers a day. That’s more than doable for a trio whose tour diaries read like transcontinental bar-hopping with some shows thrown in. The liner notes to Navigating the Bronze state that it was completed “in three weeks, 18 pizzas, 36 pots of coffee and 456 beers” (that’s 21.7 beers a day). All albums should come with such stats.
For having been recorded under such impaired conditions, Navigating walks a surprisingly straight line. Sure, there are aberrations like “Roman Coins,” a bafflingly affected drum solo that sounds like seeing double. But otherwise, songs clock in with a crisp, cool, “I’ve got a nice buzz” confidence. If the band shoved Black Flag and Black Sabbath into mud wrestling matches before, now they distill the dirt with marginally cleaner tones. The Tele twang of Unsane’s Chris Spencer comes to mind; “Dungeon Bastard” recalls the chewy chords of the Jesus Lizard’s Duane Denison. Occasionally, Aaron Walters lets fly air-guitar-inducing bursts of post-Jimmy Page/pre-Van Halen pentatonics. Tony Iommi himself would be jealous of the driving triplets of “The Curse of King David” and the odd meters of “Lungless” suggest Strap It On-era Helmet drunkenly stumbling to the bathroom in the middle of the night.
If Akimbo were my friends, they’d have “a problem.” Instead, I want to buy them a lifetime supply of PBR. —Cosmo Lee
