Trouble Dolls Play for Keeps on Their First Album

Today’s local album reviews consider the brawny guitar rock of Trouble Dolls, the country-bluegrass splendor of California and its guitarist, Dan Crary, and tales of dashed romantic hopes from Carol Martini. Ratings range from * (poor) to **** (excellent); three stars denote a solid recommendation.

*** Trouble Dolls “Cement” Doctor Dream

Call it the no-wine-before-its-time problem: One of the pitfalls for bands in Southern California is that, with so many record companies lurking about looking for the next-big-thing, rockers get plucked and poured before they’ve had a chance to ferment properly.

If you count Trouble Dolls’ previous incarnation as Nervous Touch, this O.C./Long Beach band has had four years to ripen. The waiting has paid off in reasonable hair (bassist/producer Mark Soden having had time to reconsider the Eraserhead ‘do he formerly favored) and an impressive debut album.

The aptly titled “Cement” packs an aggressive wallop, but gives more than equal time to melodic appeal and such niceties as harmony singing and guitar interplay.

Basically, Trouble Dolls is a garage band, but it plays honed, painstaking, ambitious garage rock as opposed to sloppy, bash-it-out, retrograde garage rock.

The early Who is an obvious reference. You can hear echoes in the poppy chorus harmonies that turn up regularly, in the band’s meaty beats and slashing guitar riffs and, especially, in the singing of John Surge, who often sounds like a little brother to Roger Daltrey--albeit one who is no match for big brother’s leather-lunged force and gusto.

Trouble Dolls mix it up with such songs as “Stand My Ground,” a potential college-radio hit that rides an enticing, R.E.M.-like tumbling guitar figure, and “Nevertheless,” which nicks the dark core riff from “Refugee,” the Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers’ nugget.

“Velveteen Center” is a hurtling, swarming psychedelic ride, and “Can’t Make Up My Mind” a buzzing, melodic-punk raver. The final song, “Cement,” pares rock down to its barest elements--a lone singing voice and a strummed acoustic guitar.

It’s a quiet reminder that, for all the stormy blazing and anthem-like heft that has come before, the band’s essence is its ability to turn out a coherent song.

Trouble Dolls does not break any thematic ground with its sober-minded reflections on crumbling relationships and post-adolescent anomie, but the performances have enough spirit and conviction to make you care about those common blahs.

The album opens with Surge confessing general confusion: “Everything is turning upside down / It’s getting hard to stand my ground.” By the end, in “Cement,” he no longer can stand at all, having packed himself off to bed to ride out a post-breakup depression.

At least he hasn’t wound up there without a struggle--such songs as “Another Girl” and “My Shoes” convey an urgency to repair what has gone wrong in a relationship. If lyrics like the one to “Stand My Ground” are mired in hurt and doubt, the band’s brawny, headlong delivery suggests that the narrators possess more gumption than they realize.

Far from sinking, “Cement” provides a sense of possibility and an energizing lift, both of which are an important part of the kick that you get from good rock ‘n’ roll.

Trouble Dolls play a free acoustic show at 1 p.m. on May 13 at the Cal State Fullerton University Center pub, and an electric concert May 28 at the Fullerton Hofbrau, 323 N. State College Blvd. (714) 870-7400.

Doctor Dream, 841 W. Collins Ave., Orange, CA, 92667.

** 1/2 Dan Crary “Bluegrass Guitar”

*** California “Traveler” Sugar Hill

These two 1992 releases serve as then-and-now bookends for Dan Crary, world-class acoustic guitarist.

“Then” is represented by “Bluegrass Guitar,” a reissue of Crary’s 1970 debut solo album. The guitar was considered something of a poor stepchild in the bluegrass arsenal at the time the record first appeared, and Crary played as if to make a point.

There’s precision, but also quite a bit of muscle in his performances on this all-instrumental set of traditional bluegrass tunes. The album’s chief flaw is that the session players, members of Crary’s early, Kentucky-based band, the Bluegrass Alliance, don’t match his commanding presence.

Much of the sound behind the prominent lead guitar is poorly defined, as if most of the players showed up late for the session and couldn’t get a spot close enough to a microphone.

Whenever Crary drops out, there’s a palpable sagging of energy. Without vocals, grabbing group interplay, or departures from traditional forms, sameness sets in.

By the mid-’70s, Crary had moved to Orange County and become a professor of communications at Cal State Fullerton. He fell in with some ace Southern California country-bluegrass pickers centered on the fine fiddler, Byron Berline. Now dubbing themselves California, Berline, Crary and associates have come up with unplugged music of the best sort.

“Traveler” indeed covers a lot of ground in a varied collection that is as notable for the high quality of its material as for the cornucopia of accomplished fiddle, banjo, guitar and mandolin licks that support the songs.

Crary plays like a flash, his work in the band context faster, more nimble, glistening and light-stepping than it had been 22 years before on “Bluegrass Guitar.”

As for his partners, John Moore is a breathtaking mandolinist, John Hickman a reliable team player on banjo.

Berline, besides being a fiddle whiz, offers engaging musical humor--his squeaky interjections during the racing band’s brief pauses for breath during the aptly named “Whiplash” are hilarious, and his singing on two Bill Monroe nuggets is full of wry folksiness.

The players hit a peak with the stunning “California Traveler,” an instrumental that’s alternately sunny and tensely dramatic.

Bassist Steve Spurgin does a solid job handling most of the lead vocals, and contributes some good original songwriting in a country-folk vein.

Sugar Hill, P.O. Box 4040, Duke Station, Durham, N.C., 27706.

** 1/2 Carol Martini “Piece By Piece” (no label)

Here’s a singer-songwriter who isn’t afraid to wallow in misery and self-pity.

“Piece By Piece” is given almost wholly to the lamentations of the lonely and the lovelorn, and by the end of the album most listeners will have had more than enough.

It doesn’t help that Martini often seems to settle for the first rhyme that works, leaving too many lines hackneyed and awkward. Anyone who would use the phrase “cuts like a knife,” as she does on “The Meaning of Love,” ought to be interrogated by the encrusted-thought police.

And any lyricist who can turn out a couplet as wooden as “There are freight trains I know I’ll never catch / There are records I know I’ll never match” could have a future slinging doggerel for Hallmark.

A steady diet of romantic disaster can work on an album--witness Rosanne Cash’s “Interiors”--but the language has to breathe, create drama and spark the imagination.

The thing is, Martini has a knack for couching her too-worn or too-plain notions in melodies that stick in the mind. And her fragile voice, sort of Carole King-like, but with a more alternative-rock cast to it, is well suited to the album’s accounts of depression, rejection, spite and sad reproach.

She’s emotive, but not soppy.

Enlivening the album is a sharp, nothing-fancy backing band that can give songs a clean, taut, folk-rock punch or even rise to garage-rock intensity.

“I Saw the Way,” for example, sounds like the Go-Go’s in a miserable mood. Martini’s band also supplies good detail work on songs including “With You By My Side,” in which furtive reggae rhythms and atmospheric guitar bends recall the Police.

At her best, Martini does offer a glimmer of mystery and psychological depth. “The Ghost of Love” is a dreamily melancholy recollection of lost love that calls into question whether the speaker is so isolated that she has merely imagined the affair, rather than living it.

“The Song of the Wolf” generates a smidgen of metaphoric resonance: even though its wolf-at-the-door motif is as old as “The Three Little Pigs,” Martini implies that the wolf in this case is actually inside the mind, posing a threat of paralyzing depression.

Poetry and variety of mood and theme are the pieces missing from “Piece By Piece,” and they’re pretty big ones. Still, the album’s basic musicality and honesty keeps most of it listenable.

If Martini can find those missing pieces in herself (or, perhaps, in a collaborating lyricist), she’ll be able to put together an enticing whole.

Martini plays Wednesday night at 7:30 at Regency Coffee Roast, 2500 E. Imperial Highway, Brea. (714) 256-9061.

P.O. Box 2753, Newport Beach, CA, 92663.