Grand Mal

PITCHFORKMEDIA.COM Rating 8.0 - Bill Whitten knows what he's talking about when it comes to bad timing: with his early-90s band St. Johnny, the Grand Mal leader got a couple toes in the door as part of the post-Nirvana alterna-signing sweepstakes, arriving too late to cash in on the opportunity. Where that might be enough to discourage an average rocker, inviting the certain state of laziness that so often results from near-successes, Whitten reinvented himself as glam-rock savior well ahead of the current revivalist trend-- except now that he's perfected the style, it's already a casualty of overexposure and style-over-substance bandwagon-jumpers.
So when Whitten sings that the "21st century/ Bores the hell out of me" on "Duty Free", I'm inclined to believe him, because what better way to erase time's relevance from the equation but to live in the past, a past where Marc Bolan still swaggers to the bang of a gong, Lou Reed still can't decide whether he'd rather score speed or chase transvestites, and the Replacements weren't even a twinkle in papa Alex Chilton's eye.
Still, all the dramatic nostalgia in the world is useless unless the songs are there to back it up, and that's where Whitten has surpassed his previous two outings with Grand Mal. All eleven tracks on Bad Timing are gems that balance a knack for brain-lodging choruses with the grime and stylistic drift of Exile on Main Street, begging a record collection's worth of comparisons with nary an instance of outright thievery. Whitten's lyrics are about as sharp as they come-- lines like "She says I look like a fascist/ With my black mustaches" ("Old Fashioned"), "She was standin' on the corner/ Smokin' marijuana/ Drinkin' Hi-C" ("Duty Free"), and "She was a first round knockout/ She was a beauty school dropout/ Sprung forth from the fat of the land" ("1st Round K.O.") just skim the surface of the singer's knack for unlikely rhymes and clever turns of phrase. He even manages to adopt an impartial narrative style on tracks like "Disaster Film" that packs more gritty urban drama into five minutes than Dick Wolf can spew forth in an entire season of Law & Order spinoffs.
Of course, Dave "You might remember me from such productions as The Soft Bulletin, Deserter's Songs and Hate" Fridmann's presence behind the boards certainly doesn't hurt. Though Fridmann has worked with Whitten regularly, dating back to the St. Johnny days, Bad Timing is the first record where they've really connected on a visionary level. Fridmann seems to consciously avoid going the heavily orchestrated route that has worked so well with the Lips and Mercury Rev, instead allowing Whitten to stick to the rawk while adding just enough sonic tweaks to warp things out of the ordinary-- unless female backup singers that sound as if they've been duct-taped into the mix or slide guitar disguised as a gobbling turkey don't qualify as unusual anymore.
The only real problem that Whitten has to contend with now is keeping a band together long enough to take this new batch of songs on the road-- he's the only member of the current five-piece Grand Mal lineup that even played on this record. As of this writing there's still room at the end of the coattails for another New York band or two, but in a year, as elephants represent the best that indie rock and US politics to the masses, Whitten's Bad Timing may-- regrettably-- find him slipping through the cracks of consequence yet again.
-Scott Hreha