When words fail

Call Railroad Jerk for some smart, arty music

by Jon Garelick

Call it serendipity -- there are times when an outfit hits all your buttons. The outfit for me these days is Railroad Jerk, the roughly seven-year-old New York quartet who have just released their fifth album, Third Rail (Matador). All the stuff I like is there in Railroad Jerk: blues & roots, dynamics, varied textures, a beat that's at once elastic and nailed to the floor.

Most frequently compared to labelmates the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, Railroad Jerk are more earthbound. For one, they do have a bass player. For another, Spencer likes to send up dense inky clouds of guitar noise for their own sake (a stoner's waking dream), whereas Railroad Jerk stick to clearly articulated syncopated riffs and leads. If Spencer is about romantic verbosity, the Jerk are about economy.

Railroad Jerk's lyrics likewise have more narrative appeal than Spencer's irony-laden homages to his own vanity. The Jerk borrow rootsy imagery along with the music it belongs to; there's lost highways and rattling boxcars, and the common fare of unrequited love and lust. They also add their own fillips of homely, indie-style sentiment. On Third Rail's "You Forgot," vocalist Marcellus Hall sings, "We had sex at Tower Records. I am a night person." Simple enough, but try stretching those sentences over eight bars of a medium groove. It doesn't exactly scan.

Knowing dynamics means knowing how to use silence, and likewise how to use music where words fail, to say the unsayable. (Isn't that one of the things music is for?) On the band's "Bang the Drum" (from 1995's One Track Mind), Hall runs out of words in his argument with a woman; it's a rap-like walking blues that eventually breaks down into "Blah, blah, blah, blah" and always comes back to the refrain, "Can I get some? . . . Bang the drum." There's nothing left to say after all the cranked ranting, and drummer Dave Varenka's answer is a great musical joke: four beats struck pianissimo and in slow motion, so far behind the beat that it seems to throw the music off by a whole measure. Rather than puffing up for a big pounding like a rock-and-roll animal, the music becomes a dumb-struck gorilla, a joke on its own machismo.

Varenka's beats always say a lot with a little. Third Rail's "Objectify Me" is built around a simple syncopated phrase of bass-snare hiccup and hi-hat suck, and he backs up Hall's verses with rattling rims and cymbal posts. He gets a similar pop-and-hiss pattern going on "Natalie," another syncopated pattern rather than a straight-time stomp. And "Natalie" offers another of the Jerk's jokes of defied expectations. It's a simple reversal, the woman's refrain (sung background falsetto by the band): "You can touch but you can't look," an answer to Hall's yowl, "Natalie, Natalie, I want to see your anatomy." As in "Bang the Drum," consummation comes not with power chords but with a deliciously syncopated chanka-chank mess of lo-volume guitar.

When Railroad Jerk are hitting on all cylinders, the variously tuned guitar riffs of Hall and Alec Stephens locking in with the offbeats of Varenka and bassist Tony Lee, rhythm and melody become one (those pounding guitars are like different drum tunings) and the band are unstoppable. Their self-referential asides work more like narrative distance than the typical coy wink of indie rock. "Clean Shirt" could be about the struggle to make it in a band, or just making it at all, for anybody. "I'm gonna pick myself up and get up off the dirt," Hall sings. "I'm gonna put on something nice, like my best clean shirt." On "Objectify Me" he makes white-boy blues jokes: "I was a sharecropper/I was a prizefighter." Then on the bridge he sings, "True love with commercial appeal/That's not what this song is about."

Third Rail loses some steam in its second half. ("Sweet Librarian" really is doggerel, sweet as it is.) But it's never dull. "Another Nite at the Bar" gets a ska treatment, "Well" dabbles with psychedelic Asian scales on dueling guitars, and "Middle Child" features a cameo by a power drill. Not every tune has the bomp of "Objectify Me" or "Natalie" or "Bang the Drum" or "The Ballad of Railroad Jerk" (also from One Track Mind). In the meantime, there's pleasure to be had in the way Hall croons the title "Dusty Knuckle" (the name of a barroom character?) or breaks one of his narratives of unrequited love to announce, apropos of nothing, "Everyone had a good scare in the '90s . . . and the '80s/I wish I could bottle up and sell your beauty."

When they played Boston last summer at Axis with Guided by Voices and Cat Power, Railroad Jerk reveled in their snaky arrangements and even preened a bit, Spencer style. They've yet to put a sound that big on disc -- maybe they're too wedded to lo-fi aesthetics. But the music itself is way big enough.

Railroad Jerk play the Middle East upstairs next Friday, November 1, with Skeleton Key, the Delta 72, and the Renderers.