Dis Ain't Da Drum...

...can a bad drum sound sink a record? I don't think so. That first Moby Grape album had drums that sound like a piece of notebook paper hit with a pencil, but the songs, singing, and guitar playing are so mighty that, well, one overlooks the anemic drummin'. I'm also thinking of the weird gated drum sound on Michael Penn's "No Myth," which is hard to tell if it's just '80s drums or if they are being blown out like that as some sort of special effect.

The subject popped into my head because I went to the record store this morning and picked up the new Jules Shear album More, which for some reason he recorded as Jules Mark Shear. (After what, three decades as just plain old "Jules Shear"? Whatever.) More has what has got to be the worst drum sound I've heard on record this year...simultaneously tinny and cavernous, very modern sounding in a bad way. Digital. The bass drum has the same sorta "pop" to it that I imagine Tom Brady's ACL does -- not a warm heartbeat, but a cold snap.

Fortunately the drum sound doesn't ruin the album...the album kinda ruins the album. I could only get four songs in before I turned it off, but this is a very mannered attempt to ROCK again, from a writer/performer who was always more a pop guy. The title track has hung around his repertoire for years, and wasn't all that great acoustic -- much less electrified all out of proportion. I guess I need to stop buying his records...

Since his mighty trio of disks with Jules and the Polar Bears, to his '80s solo albums (great big '80s pop with brains), to his amazing albums for Island in the '90s, he's been constantly surprising and enlightening...but since Healing Bones, it seems like something left the building. He did a little acoustic album a year or two ago that was a step in the right direction, which he has clearly disregarded with this beast...More was produced by Sean Slade, who made a name for himself making '90s alternative rock albums, of which quite a few now sound dated. This new Shear disk has a distinctly out of time feel, and not in a good "lost classic" way...I'm sad now.