Angry Salad: Lettuce Entertain You

If Angry Salad aren't the hardest-working band in town, they certainly work more often than most. Formed in 1992 at Brown University, the quartet soon garnered a strong following there that led to jobs opening for Fishbone, the Mighty Mighty Bosstones, Better Than Ezra, the Verve Pipe, and Barenaked Ladies. This year alone, Angry Salad have some 250 dates planned; that averages out to more than five shows per week, folks. If the band don't break any new musical ground, the baseball-hat-wearing minions who regularly fill the clubs to see them don't seem to care.

The band's second CD, Bizarre Gardening Accident (Breaking World), blends bittersweet melodies with straight-ahead rhythms. If it's not earth-shattering, it does stick to the ear a bit better than much of the overwrought pop confectionery at play on today's radio. The jangly guitars, perky drumming, and moody vocal breaks create an accessible if none-too-challenging sound. It's pleasant, perhaps because it reminds you of something you've heard before -- in Big Country, or pre-Messiah-complex U2, or a younger, less complex R.E.M. The bright, ringing guitars on "Stretch Armstrong," "Scared of Highways," and "Coming to Grips" suggest that these guys would have been all over the charts in the '80s.

The band are drawn equally to melodrama and cleverness. Frontguy Bob Whelan's voice is clear and warm, able to shout or croon. Time and again, Whelan sideswipes the angst of his lyrics with a witty aside or pop-culture reference that signals both his erudition (he alludes to poet Wallace Stevens and children's author Shel Silverstein in the same song) and his knowledge of what sells. (What else can you think about a band who cover, in its entirety, and seemingly without irony, Nena's "99 Red Balloons?")

"Stretch Armstrong" is about a wrecked relationship, and in the end the kitschy image of that rubbery childhood toy defuses Whelan's despair. Other pieces go for all-out escapism -- "The Milkshake Song" is a wistful, sugary tune that longs for the innocence and simplicity of junior-high love, complete with a riff that nods happily to the Jackson 5 (think: "I Want You Back"). There are moments of unadulterated sorrow, like "Saturday Girl," about the shadows in the mind of a girl in a psychiatric hospital, and "Rico" (originally from 1993's The Guinea Pig EP), which expresses bewilderment at losing one's friends in a car crash. That song's sparse arrangement allows the acoustic strumming to underline Whelan's vocals. But again, the grief is punctured, this time by an explanation of why the singer wasn't in the car: he'd left early to go home and tape The Simpsons. Other tales of relationships gone weirdly wrong include "Coming to Grips," which would not have been out of place on the Chasing Amy soundtrack; the singer describes his chagrin at discovering his beloved is a lesbian, and he makes wry reference to Joe Jackson ("Is she really going out with her?")

What creates Angry Salad's vast and loyal fan base (they're one of the few local bands who consistently pack the Middle East downstairs) is their fervent belief in the redemptive power of pop music. In "Empty Radio" they sing, "My father'd drive/I'd take the shotgun side/With the window down and the signal clear/I'd hope to hear the Cheap Trick record/Over and over again." The band claim that, in a notorious gig from a few years back, Live kicked them off a tour for upstaging them. That or maybe Angry Salad just weren't angry enough to be hip. About which they're unapologetic. As they ask in "Empty Radio," "When they hit the stage, do they feign the rage/That plays so well on empty radio?"

-- Mary A. Ricciardi

(Angry Salad play the Middle East this Friday, September 12; call 497-0576.)