"Ex Stasi Spy" wants to be "Light Aircraft on Fire", while "U Boat Baby" marries a glam-stomp to a fairly misguided lyrical fliration with Nazi imagery. I suppose Luke Haines is smart enough to deflect that criticism by saying he's really making fun of the punk bands who foolishly trifled in such stuff decades ago. And while he'd be right arguing that, it's a lesson no one's stupid enough to need anymore, rendering a rather fantastic riff-rocker something unsavory, frankly. Elsewhere, "I Just Want To Be Buried" is as close as Luke's going to get to recording dad rock, but it's a rather straightforward and sucessful composition, and one at odds in its directness with some of the oblique highpoints in his considerable back-catalog.
The real peaks of Setting the Dogs on the Post-Punk Postman are other tunes here, noticeably not the rather silly "Andrea Dworkin's Knees", obviously. "Ivor on the Bus" weds sound-bytes and imagery about Ivor Cutler with a strong melody, while "Never Going Back to Liverpool" offers up a delicious hook -- Peter Buck is on this album and I'd bet even money he's on this track -- with the kind of vocal performance we heard all over the Bootboys album at the century's end (or beginning, as your POV dictates). Still, the best thing here is the gentle "Landscape Gardening", a composition that finds Haines rightly (and briefly) trying to be Ray Davies and nearly succeeding. That number is such a gem that it redeems so much of the other tracks that felt less entirely fresh. I mean, there's nothing I really diskliked on Setting the Dogs on the Post-Punk Postman, but lots that really didn't fire me up like the bitter genius' older records did. Still, it's not 1999 anymore, is it?
Setting The Dogs on the Post-Punk Postman is out on Friday via Cherry Red Records.
More details on Luke Haines via the Facebook page.
[Photo: Cherry Red Records]