Fully 16 years after the band's third album (Massachusets) the original Scud Mountain Brothers are back together again with an album featuring nine new songs and a cover of John Barry's Theme From Midnight Cowboy.
This reformation is all the more surprising given that for 14 of those years the four Scuds never spoke to one another.
The lack of communication illustrates the degree of acrimony towards Joe Pernice in particular after he effectively ditched the band to pursue his own career just when they seemed to be on the verge of wider success on the Sub-Pop label.
Time may be a healer but the new material gives no sign that these men have mellowed with age.
Pernice is one of those songwriters who composes gorgeous melodies and sings sweetly but whose lyrics reveal a darker side to his character. You do well to take note of the warning - "don't be charmed by my elegance" on The Mendicant.
The album title is therefore at odds with the melancholy tone of the album. That’s a bare light bulb on the cover, not a glowing sun.
There iis, for example, a song about hauling away a Double Bed marks a point of no return ("cigarette burn smiling faces in the mattress speak of better times") and there are decidedly menacing undertones to Learn To Love Him ("I'm deep in something I wish I wasn't in").
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Stephen Desaulnier's three songs are no cheerier. His deep Johnny Cash style vocals add a darker subtext to Crown of Thorns , the murder ballad Orphan Girl and You're Mine.
Add to this Drew Got Shot based on a dying soldier's last words ("Don't tell my family how I screamed when I died") and you'll understand that Bruce Tull's poignant pedal steel and the breezy west coast style harmonies are merely a sugar coating to take off the bitter edge to these songs.
The brevity of this album (it lasts just 36 minutes), together with the fact that there's also a new Pernice Brothers record in the pipeline, suggests that it will be a one-off.
This is a pity in many ways, since this record, together with the reissue of their first two albums, reminds you what an underrated band the Scud Mountain Boys were and are.
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