POP MUSIC REVIEW : Michigan Trio Mule Is an Inspired Alternative

There’s a million of them now, these hard-edged “alternative” bands with four-letter names and Kurt Cobain howls, pounding across the country in search of the golden ring. You might stand outside Baker and see one after another of them speeding by, Tradesman vans whooshing past like desert caravans in the night. And yet, to paraphrase Ronald Reagan’s reaction to his discovery that Colombia was in fact not Peru, these bands are different from one another.

Take Mule, for example, a Michigan power trio splintered off from neo-punk pioneer Laughing Hyenas, is the closest thing around to a grunge hippy-jam band, some inspired, howling cross between Nirvana and Humble Pie. At Bogart’s on Thursday, the drummer, obviously influenced by jazz guys like Tony Williams, dropped bombs all over the place, rode on his ride cymbals, was syncopated enough so that the basic beat sounded like an old slant-six engine missing on a cylinder or two. The bass player cranked tough, masculine fusion-esque lines that somehow paused on the bluesy minor third long enough to give the impression of heavy metal without explicitly being metal. These guys can play.

Mule was funky in that way that no actual funk band ever really manages to be, and sometimes had the loose feeling of a rehearsal-studio jam, as if they were working out a song rather than performing one.