Musicians aren’t unlike anybody else in that if you ask nicely, they’re likely to tell you the story of their lives. Most of them, knowing that you’re planning to ask, will just put the story in writing, deliver it to websites for publicity, or ask you to buy it as part of the book. They’ll likely exaggerate details as well, only to make sure that you remain interested.
Still, there are those, and they’re usually the good ones, that you’ll never have to pressure for a story. They’re the artists, and they just can’t help themselves. No, they’re not putting the gossip in print or asking you to click “like” on their social media. They’ll tell it to you in devastating detail in between shards of guitar riffs and lyrics that spell out the whole story.
This is what Blister does upon the band’s return with the album “numb.” The garage-rock duo remains proudly primitive in terms of musical leanings, and amazingly sophisticated in matters of revealing who they truly are and what they really want.
Just listen to the album opener, the punk and proud “It’s Not You,” a song that attacks the listener from the first moment and spends the next two minutes chasing them around the room.
Need a breather? Well, you ain’t getting it. “I Think I Got You Know” is a song smeared in fuzzed-out riffs where the vocals sound both intimidating and wholly fragile as they tell a story of broken trust and appropriate decisions.
In fact, that’s the tone of the album throughout. The songs are, typically, short, punchy, and honest. They feel like a recorded session os some kind of forward-thinking therapy session where the person on the couch is encouraged to scream back their truths at the one holding the pen and pipe.
“Don’t Fall in Love” is made to sound like The Undertones, but wise, cynical and ready to advise anyone who’ll listen to close their hearts and watch their backs. “It Is What Is” brings to mind the Dead Kennedys and makes the Blister boys both disgusted with the past and triumphantly ready to step into the future. And the hooky, Ramones-like “Family Values” shows that duo is as distrustful of the ways of the world as it ever likely was.
The songs on “numb” are at their best when they’re short, angry, and, in a strange way, wonderfully optimistic. Nah, it’s not the kind of optimism that you get to make a slogan out of and stick on a book jacket.
But where does it all leave us? In a way, it’s Blister’s cover of “You Can’t Put Your Arms Around a Memory,” that tells the story of “numb” in the shortest and clearest way. The past might be a hideous, messed-up thing. But it’s gone. Blister’s musicians are going to be damned if they’re not moving forward, and the band’s put that simple, powerful idea into 13 new recordings.
