Andrew W.K. - Close Calls with Brick Walls / Mother of Mankind

Andrew Wilkes-Krier may be the most earnest pop musician alive and strangely also one of the most misunderstood. His debut album, 2001's I Get Wet, was a sui generis, perfect encapsulation of an aesthetic, namely, party hard.  This seemingly straightforward message, which was manifested in equally relentless and relentlessly processed chugging guitars, pounded pianos, keyboards and drums and shouted declaratives with laughingly small differentiation over 12 songs (and in album art so bloody and in-your-face that it came covered in black shrink wrap), became, to those who heard it, a litmus test.  You got it or you didn't.  Those who didn't agreed that the appropriated 80's arena rock sounds and single-minded obsession with "partying" were offensive.  Yet inside that camp, there were two distinct school of thoughts: either "this guy is an idiot" or "this guy is joking but it's not funny."  They were both wrong.  Andrew W.K. is very, very serious but he's also self-aware.  As he revealed in interviews that were just as remarkably straightforward and impassioned as his music, Andrew W.K. pushed a worldview that was no less well considered for its intellectual proximity to self-affirmation.  And in concerts that were closer to tent revivals in their jubilant fervor and whole-audience-on-stage generosity, he walked the walk.  The decline started on his 2003 follow up, The Wolf, which took the same themes but changed the sound to equally epic if less thrilling mid-tempo hard rock.  Now, Close Calls with Brick Walls, originally a Japan-only release in 2006, is finally seeing the light of the day (paired with rarities collection Mother of Mankind).  Unfortunately, the album seems to show a unique and thoughtful artist running out of ideas.It took me a few listens to Close Calls, to realize what had changed for Andrew W.K.  The music still sounds huge. He's still prosthelytizing about living life to its fullest, wildest extreme.  But it's missing the rapturous danger that colored I Get Wet.  On that album, he could have just as easily been singing about murder as partying hard.  He made a strictly positive message sound pernicious and subversive.  On Close Calls, as with The Wolf, Andrew W.K. sounds as safe as the bland racket behind him.  There are a few moments of inspiration.  Album opener 'I Came for You' is short and coiled, the perfect lead-in for signature W.K. bombast.  But that bombast doesn't arrive until track three ('Not Going to Bed' which is followed by album highlight 'You Will Remember Tonight,' a two song run that's the closest W.K. comes in sound or spirit to I Get Wet).  Instead, we get a strange and nebulous sounding experiment called 'Close Calls with Bal Harbour' and the tension is lost.  It's understandable that the hard, crystallized sound of I Get Wet would feel constraining after a while, but W.K. sounds lost throughout the album as he tries on new stylings.  A few times, he connects, like on the chanting funk of 'Slam John Against the Brick Wall' but mostly it sounds like he's forgone genuine inspiration and instead just turned everything up to 11.  For an album that feels like its searching futilely for a new foothold on each track, it goes on way too long at 18 songs.  The songs that somehow didn't make the cut are collected on Mother of Mankind, of which nothing needs to be said.Ultimately it seems like in creating the ingeniously iconoclastic I Get Wet, which was rightfully celebrated for its monomaniacal uniformity of sound and theme, Andrew W.K. left himself nowhere to go.  And on Close Calls with Brick Walls, W.K.'s carefully crafted character, ideology and aesthetic all sound finished.  Andrew W.K. as we know him may be over, but here's hoping that one of the most original artists of the 2000's finds a way to reinvent himself.