POP ALBUM REVIEW : Earthly Concerns of Dramarama’s ‘Hi-Fi Sci-Fi’

Dramarama

“Hi-Fi Sci-Fi”

Chameleon/Elektra

* * * 1/2

Seven years have passed since “Anything, Anything (I’ll Give You)” became a hit on KROQ-FM, prompting Dramarama to move from Wayne, N.J., to Los Angeles. After two self-financed albums, “Cinema Verite” and “Box Office Bomb,” the band landed its first label deal in 1989, and its artistic development has been sure, if its commercial progress spotty.

The high quality of “Stuck in Wonderamaland” (1989), “Vinyl” (1991) and now “Hi-Fi Sci-Fi” signals artistic staying power, even as Dramarama lives with the doubt and disappointment that are its most reliable source of songwriting inspiration.

“Hi-Fi,” maybe. “Sci-Fi,” not in the least.

On its fifth album, Dramarama and its main songwriter, La Habra resident John Easdale, stick to that familiar but always reliable dictum, “write what you know.”

One thing Dramarama seems to have learned after its series of estimable but only sporadically successful albums is that--as one of the band’s prime influences, Mott the Hoople, put it--”rock ‘n’ roll’s a loser’s game.”

The first half of “Hi-Fi Sci-Fi” is about the anguish that befalls musicians caught up in a system where commerce comes before art.

Egged on by ambition, ego and a drive for recognition (these are not bad qualities if tempered by good taste, high standards and the gumption to uphold them), they have no choice but to play the game, with all its rules and pressures to perform--not just on stage and in the studio, but also at the cash register.

At the core of the album’s second half is a sort of cocaine concerto: three consecutive songs concerning recovery from drug abuse, in which Dramarama signals its awareness that the game’s biggest losers are those whose collateral kicks endanger their ability to keep on playing.

There’s a huge risk here of solipsism and irrelevance, especially in the songs about the travails of rock ‘n’ roll contenders.

Why should any serious person care about this narrow, over-mythologized walk of life? Hasn’t enough been said and sung about it? Shouldn’t any half-sentient onlooker be sick by now of celebrities and would-be celebrities cluttering the media bazaar with their boasts and complaints? And if it’s so tough, why don’t these bozos shaddup and get a real job?

Dramarama surmounts these objections in the simplest way. It tells its stories with heart, intensity and its usual attention to pop-craft. It rocks with a wired drive--the weightiest, most explosive sound the band has ever mustered--underscoring the desperation that pervades virtually every song.

Rock-as-milieu becomes a context for universal themes: aspiration, disillusionment and the awful feeling that you’ve blown your chances and squandered your youthful energy and idealism trudging after a mirage.

Consequently, Dramarama’s new album manages to join the honor-roll of self-referential rock that works.

The songs on Side One beg thematic comparison to the likes of Mott’s “The Ballad of Mott the Hoople,” Traffic’s “Dear Mr. Fantasy” and “The Low Spark of High Heeled Boys,” plus a sizable chunk of the catalogues of both the Kinks and the Who. “Hi-Fi Sci-Fi” doesn’t quite equal those predecessors, but it’s worthy of their company on your record shelf.

The opening track, “Hey Betty,” is Dramarama’s pummeling take on pumped-up, brute-force rock played on an arena-ready scale. Stylistically, it’s almost a form of slumming for this brainy band, but thematically it exemplifies the lusty animal spirits that underlie rock ‘n’ roll. It also says something about rock’s Dionysiac allure as a primal, ecstatic power that votaries can use to charge themselves up, or--taking it even further--obliterate the self.

In “Work for Food,” one of Dramarama’s best songs, Easdale inhabits the role of a failed musician who has become a homeless beggar, his career memorabilia piled pathetically in a shopping cart.

The character’s fleeting chances have passed, and his security and perhaps a slice of his sanity have been sacrificed on rock’s game board. There’s pathos in the portrayal, but also nobility in this loser’s declaration: “I keep on rolling, keep on rolling on.”

The song names no names, but it can stand as a poignant salute to Syd Barrett, Brian Wilson, Roky Erickson and many unknown soldiers who went to the rock wars and came back badly wounded.

Taken metaphorically instead of as a character sketch, “Work for Food” implies that even seemingly secure, intact performers are compulsive beggars whose every new album and tour is a plea for mass approval.

To end the first-half sequence, Easdale lays on the self-pity relentlessly (but tellingly) in “Senseless Fun.” With this dirge, he admits defeat in the marketplace and despairs even of making an original artistic mark: “Tell me the truth, I know it--everything has been done.”

To the listener’s great gratification, Dramarama’s spirits soar on the first two songs of what the band, recognizing the formal superiority of the LP over the CD, labels “Side Two.”

Easdale and band throw off despair and come roaring back on “Bad Seed,” boosting their confidence with boastful bad-boy swagger and refusing to be daunted by the overwhelming weight of the rock ‘n’ roll past.

They give the past a great big kiss, or maybe spit in its face, as they blatantly imitate the New York Dolls stealing from the Rolling Stones (Dolls alum Sylvain Sylvain even sings backups).

It’s as if they’re saying: “Who cares if it’s not new? It rocks, and right now, we’re the ones doing the rocking.”

“Invincible” is the album’s emotional high point, a winning love song full of affectionate details drawn from daily life--one of them being the couple’s use of music as the food of love and the very staff of life: “and we can’t live without our radio.”

Then comes the troika of post-detox songs. Too bracing to be a downer, “Prayer” hits like a mortar shell as Easdale, his frayed voice clenched in a desperate grip, clings to a fragile newfound sobriety.

Meanwhile, lead guitarist Mark Englert (credited only as “Mr. E.” or “Mr. E. Boy” on past releases) wails away in quotation of “Gimme Shelter,” that icon of rock desperation.

The song (or at least the central idea) remains the same on the next track, “Don’t Feel Like Doing Drugs.” But Easdale keeps our interest by substituting an engaging, wry wit for the storm-swept dread of “Prayer.”

Last in the drug trilogy is “Right On Baby, Baby,” which should have closed the album. It’s the sort of Stones-inspired rock ballad that the Black Crowes often venture but never turn into more than a genre exercise--mainly because Chris Robinson hasn’t a semblance of Easdale’s insight and imagination, the qualities that make for a personal songwriting voice. (Then again, Dramarama’s prospects in the marketing game wouldn’t be hurt if Easdale had a semblance of Robinson’s stage charisma.)

More yearning than hopeful, “Right On” is about two friends who have been scarred by playing that loser’s game too hard: The one who has shaken off dangerous habits holds out a hand to the one still mired in excess, hoping against hope that this friend in jeopardy has the will to grab it.

The game in “Right On Baby, Baby” is no longer rock ‘n’ roll--it’s life. The question isn’t commercial success but survival, and the theme is one person’s responsibility to another--what it demands, where it has to end.

The concluding “Late Night Phone Call” is an overwrought indulgence, a melodrama that Easdale sings in a weird, small, strung-out voice. There’s a passing similarity in approach to some of Alex Chilton’s bleakly gorgeous balladry on “Big Star’s Third,” but with none of the lyricism.

One wouldn’t want to skip the dessert Dramarama serves at the end. The “Double Secret Bonus Tracks” are a rollicking hoot, as the band jokes around with studio tomfoolery, then rumbles through a comical, apparently improvised, Little Richard-style rocker, “Hey, Grandpa.” It reminds you that, all of rock’s gamesmanship aside, its simple essence is fun.