Butt-ugly America

It's odd for a rock band to focus on the misery of life out in the Middle of Nowhere, especially a band pitching their wares to an alternative audience hell-bent on escaping their own Nowheres and still too young to care about who and what they're leaving behind. You might say Ass Ponys play "adult alternative," but that doesn't ally them with other adult genres -- not even country -- or with anyone on the Lollapalooza bill. Recently, main Ass Pony Chuck Cleaver mulled this over on the phone from his rural home 35 miles outside Cincinnati: "We occupy such an odd space. We're too fucked up for triple-A radio, we're sometimes too normal for alternative -- too old for young, too young for old. So where do we exist? We may never figure that out."

In fact, it's even hard to figure out who to compare them to. You can see the influence of Cleaver's "really and truly favorite band" the Embarrassment (indie rock's great lost hope of the early '80s), but even they don't dig as deep into the psychological dirt of their Midwestern home turf as does Cleaver on The Known Universe. In lyrics ranging from straight narratives to surreal impressions, he lets the hidden horrors of small-town life spill forth in a nightmarish parade reminiscent of a young David Lynch or an old Francisco Goya: the countryside teems with maggot-infested corpses, huge crawling bugs, headless turtles, and dead flying birds. The people who live there are lonely, paranoid, deranged, or worse. "It's Summer Here" brings it all to a climax with a black and comic attempt to describe the colic underbelly of everything bucolic: "The river looks like chocolate milk/It's foaming at the banks/The snakes come out to sun themselves/You think you've died and gone to hell."

Ironically, the chorus to that one is the most soaring and infectious that Ass Ponys have yet written, which is exactly why the song works. If Cleaver is obsessed with decay and cramped by despair, the band's collaborative compositions are neither. Buoyed by clean, ringing guitars and Cleaver's high, clear vocals, their songs more often than not are tuneful, driving, expansive. With the notable help of new lead guitarist Bill Alletzhauser -- a young virtuoso who fills almost every song with fast, upward-spiraling runs -- The Known Universe pushes this dialectic between words and music farther than ever.

Unfortunately that doesn't necessarily make their new album their best yet. After the admirable balance of their 1994 major-label debut, Electric Rock Music, the unrelenting grimness of The Known Universe is often a letdown, though always an affecting and fascinating one. Cleaver himself prefers to see his bleak country settings as a subjective device rather than an attempt at objective portrayal. "Simply because I'm such a malcontent, I kind of substitute my viewpoint for somebody else's. I don't think it has to do with the rural area. In any walk of life, there are people who are going to rise above it and people who are going to fall . . . I don't know. I figure that if with some regularity you visit bad places and shitty places, it can almost have an opposite effect. I'm not saying go to sanitariums and stuff just to make yourself feel better -- at least I'm not that crazy -- but it seems to me that I can reinforce the fact that I'm not that bad off by visiting weird places in my songs."

It doesn't take much, however, to see that this therapeutic practice also works on a larger scale. Call it the escape of rock and roll -- at heart, the escape of the crowded, noisy city -- versus the crushing limitation of America's big, empty countryside. What's the last time the two struggled so close, except in real life?