The Loud Family

September 19 - 26, 1 9 9 6 [Off the Record]

**** The Loud Family

INTERBABE CONCERN

(Alias)
How far can you stretch the boundaries of guitar-based pop? Probably not as far as Scott Miller, who led Game Theory in the '80s and is now on his third album with the Loud Family. After a misguided attempt to give his bandmates the spotlight on 1994's The Tape of Only Linda, he's back in control for this album, which apparently came from a period of personal upheaval. It's the first really hard-edged thing he's done, with sudden mood shifts within songs, flashes of lyrical bitterness (great title #1: "Screwed Over by Stylish Introverts"), a harsher tone in both his singing and guitar playing (great title #2: "Top Dollar Survivalist Hardware"), and a string of aching closing numbers. (The final "Where They Walk over Sainte Thérèse" -- great title #3 -- has a clenched-teeth vocal that turns a lovely tune into an unsettling one.) For all its challenging song structures, Interbabe Concern is also full of mile-wide hooks, garage guitars, and the odd cerebral joke: the opening "Sodium Laureth Sulfate" has Miller announcing "My girlfriend's got sodium laureth sulfate" in the same tone of voice that a more innocent singer might have used for "My baby does the hanky-panky." And it probably means the same thing.
-- Brett Milano
(The Loud Family play the Middle East tonight, September 19.)