Rockers Get a Move On

Naked Soul steps ahead, Duq-N-Cover steps lively, and Stacey Q steps into eroticism. But the Swamp Zombies keep stepping in place, and Shakespeare & the Lumberjack step over the line.

Today’s column of local record reviews covers a grab-bag of styles. On the album side, there’s college-alternative-whatever rock steeped in anguish (Naked Soul) or played mainly for laughs (Swamp Zombies), and a debut album of meat-and-potatoes bluesy hard stuff from Duq-N-Cover. New CD-singles find dance-pop chanteuse Stacey Q attempting a comeback, and rappers Shakespeare & the Lumberjack making their debut, with both acts apparently convinced that selling sex is the way to grab attention. The ratings scale runs from * (poor) to **** (superb). Three stars denote a solid recommendation.

*** NAKED SOUL

“Visiting Your Planet”

Scotti Bros.

This trio, led by singer-songwriter-guitarist Mike Conley, has taken a substantial step forward with its first full-length album.

Naked Soul’s 1992 debut EP, “Seed,” held promise, but it featured just one original song, “Lonely Me, Lonely You,” that had the melodic strength to make it stick in the mind. The catchiness quotient rises considerably on “Visiting Your Planet,” and, with massed guitars buzzing and distorting in a consistently thick and aggressive attack, there has been no loss of clout.

Naked Soul’s approach is nothing new: It falls somewhere between the Replacements and Nirvana on the continuum of bands in which the guitars bark in raw, gritty homage to the punk ethic, yet serve as a tuneful foundation for vocal melodies that only a songwriter in love with pure-pop could conjure.

Having covered a Who song, “So Sad About Us,” on “Seed,” Naked Soul here repeatedly borrows the Who’s technique of using well-placed backing vocals to accentuate the pop side.

In the middle of the vituperative, garage-punk burner, “You, Me and Jack Kerouac,” for example, the band momentarily breaks off its swarming blitz for a chorus of sardonic but poppy la-la-la’s.

Echoes of earlier rock also turn up in the jangling, Byrds-derived guitar intro to “Dizzy,” and the wholesale appropriation, in “Let Me Down,” of the core riff to the Nick Lowe-Elvis Costello nugget “(What’s So Funny ‘Bout) Peace, Love and Understanding?”

Those echoes from old albums should come as no surprise: judging from Conley’s lyrics, his record collection is his most reliable source of solace. The album’s emotional high-water mark, in “Dizzy,” finds him spinning an old Who album and thinking that maybe the future will be bright, after all: “Listen to ‘Live at Leeds,’ oh, it sends me / Wait and see, we’ll be free, dizzy.”

For the most part, the album finds Conley assessing the pain of relationships either crumbling or already reduced to rubble, and not doing a very good job of heeding his own warning, in “Wound” (as in “wound up”), about the dangers of too much introspective brooding:

It spins its web inside your head

Frustration murdering your patience

Digging down inside where the problems always lie

Pulling weeds in your soul again ...

Sometimes I can’t hold back the monkeys and the rats

Am I losing me again? In “Helicopter Man,” the album’s best song, an anguished Conley decides to go airborne in an effort to temporarily escape his pain and wonders which intoxicant to use: drugs, or music (the curdled cry, “wasted!” at the end, suggests the narrator has made the more dangerous choice).

Lyrically, Naked Soul deals mainly in commonplace themes and images (the above quotation from “Wound” is Conley at by far his most vivid). But the music and the singer’s ragged-voiced urgency allow the band to reach a sense of sadness beyond words.

At the same time, the forcefulness of the expressive attempt somehow shatters the gloom and at least partly redeems the painful experience that brought it on.

To varying degrees, every song on the album is a lament, but such highlights as “Dizzy” (which comes from the same bittersweet mold as “Lonely Me, Lonely You”), the stately “Wishing Again” and the fine, freely coursing elegy “If It’s Cool With You” bring a sense of uplift.

This desire to make transcendent music out of feelings that can pull us down leads Naked Soul to go overboard with songs that take a heraldic, anthem-like tone. Consequently, a sense of sameness sets in down the home stretch.

“Jack Kerouac,” on the blazing side, and the concluding ballad, “Visiting Your Planet,” offer welcome departures. The latter is an evocative, finely wrought piece in which Jeff Sewell’s warm, sympathetic bass line seems designed to comfort a particularly bereft and distant-sounding Conley during his loneliest moment. That quieter side would be worth cultivating further.

**

SWAMP ZOMBIES

“Spunk!”

Doctor Dream

“Spunk” rhymes with “slump,” which is what the Swamp Zombies have hit on this, their fifth and least-rewarding album.

The band, now a trio with original members Josh Agle (guitar) and Steve Jacobs (bass) teaming with longtime drummer Dave Warren, hasn’t changed its distinctive, idiosyncratic sound, which moves between a raucous rock garage and a lively coffeehouse hootenanny.

But Swamp Zombies’ familiar, offhanded rattle-and-strum approach begins to sound stale and repetitive here in the absence of imaginative material.

The best Swamp Zombies’ stuff usually has described strange encounters or presented odd, myth-like stories--often humorous, but typically a little spooky, with an undercurrent of wonder and mystery to them.

On “Spunk!” the band gets bogged down in a studied contemplation of cool. It’s not as if Swamp Zombies are trying to satirize or celebrate the concept of cool: either would have required a stronger point of view than we get here. They’re just raking through trash-culture debris for artifacts of what was once thought cool, and which might now offer a moment’s diversion.

A bluesy, coolly swinging leadoff instrumental, “Purple,” sounds like the sultry soundtrack music that used to signal something naughty brewing on “Twin Peaks.”

“The Way I Walk,” a swaggering rockabilly tune previously recorded with a true-believer’s abandon by ‘50s revivalist Robert Gordon, here musters neither the bite to be a worthy example of tough-guy bravado, nor the ironic wit to lampoon the ethic of slicked-back, leather-jacketed, delinquent hipness.

Other artifacts of cool unearthed on “Spunk!” include a twangy instrumental rendition of the James Bond movie theme, “Man With the Golden Gun,” and “She’s So Far Out She’s In,” a dopey celebration of a hippie lass’s charms originally recorded by that immortal trio Dino, Desi & Billy. In its lively take on the early Beatles, it’s actually a diverting little genre exercise.

The Swamp Zombies’ original songs here tend to be casual, too-obvious put-downs of uncool types (“Ripoff Boy,” “She’s a Drag,” “I Love You, Etc.”), or such inconsequential little tales as “Come on Man, Let’s Go,” which concerns “a swingin’ way-gone ghost” who finds being dead no drag on his hip insouciance, and “Mudbog,” wherein the manic music almost carries a so-what, stereotype-ridden lyric about besotted backwoods denizens.

“Daddy Long Legs” is less a story than a second-grade entomology lesson that tells us what voracious critters these spidery insects are. There’s no interesting point of view here, no real connection between the song’s narrator and the bug that has caught his interest (compare “Boris the Spider,” in which the Who’s bassist, John Entwistle, achieved an indelible blend of humor and horror by arranging a close encounter of the squishy kind between scary insect and scared human).

Most Swamp Zombies albums contain a few straightforward folk-pop songs. Two in that class, “Oatmeal,” an ode to nonconformity, and the lovelorn “I Built a Wall” are the only tracks from “Spunk!” in which the band registers real commitment to its material.

Otherwise, Swamp Zombies, whose previous two albums were good ones, sounds like a band that lacks fresh inspiration and is just trying to stay amused.

** 1/2

DUQ-N-COVER

“Incoming”

Duq-It Productions

This self-financed debut album could have been a hash of warmed-up leftovers: Duq-N-Cover doesn’t concern itself with originality as it serves up a melodic hard-rock recipe that calls for a dollop of Van Halen, a smidgen of Motley Crue, and a whole heapin’ helpin’ of Bad Company. However, this Orange County foursome stirs the pot with performances marked by impeccable craft and infectious zest. The result doesn’t have the substance or fresh spin to make one want seconds, but every track here is tasty enough while it’s being served.

Actually, Duq-N-Cover does show signs of wanting to bring an occasional twist to its source material.

An instrumental (the slightly off-color title of which we’ll skip) that begins as a standard hard-rockin’ boogie with guitar licks swiped from the Eddie Van Halen handbook takes an interesting turn just when you think Duq-N-Cover is sufficiently unambitious to content itself with the same old boogie that everyone else plays.

Suddenly, they’ve down-shifted into a slow, Chicago blues, and soon enough a flute pops up, signaling a move to a jazzy-blues mood that could have come straight off the first Jethro Tull album. Borrowed styles all, but at least they’re culled to avoid a stale formula.

The band’s singer, Matt Stanley, has a Paul Rodgers fixation, which would be disastrous if he didn’t have the stuff to do a pretty good job of mimicking the much-admired former singer of Free and Bad Company.

Stanley stretches his phrases soulfully, sings with bright command, and avoids having to play roles that are too hopelessly cliched or dumb. His sharp harmonica playing also gives the band a second solo voice to complement Gregg Thompson’s accomplished, if pat, guitar leads.

“Piece-O-Mind” is the monologue of a randy tough-guy stud with an obvious come-on line that seeks to reel in the ladies by showing just a hint of vulnerability. But, after finishing the song with some stud-like falsetto yowling, Stanley humorously undercuts the feat, and the character, by collapsing into a hacking cough.

A sense of tongue-in-cheek humor also colors “7-N-7,” which otherwise would be just another stupid celebration of the hard-boozing rock ‘n’ roll lifestyle. “Call It a Day,” with its working-guy’s lament about being stuck in a dull, dead-end job, is about as deep as Duq-N-Cover gets. It offers no illuminating imagery but does convey honest feeling.

With no lowlights, and such highlights as the exuberant “No Stoppin’ Me,” Duq-N-Cover comes off as a bunch of solid pros who can confidently churn out good-time rock ‘n’ roll.

(Contact phone: (714) 841-8692.) **

STACEY Q

“Two Hot for Love”

Thump Records

Stacey Q (real name, Stacey Swain) hit it big with her 1986 single, “Two of Hearts,” recorded three albums for Atlantic, and dropped out of the dance-pop scene about four years ago to spend some time studying Buddhism in Nepal.

There’s no asceticism in this comeback single. Actually, “Two Hot for Love” is more or less soft-core aural porn--a frankly erotic (though not quite sexually explicit) wet dream that’s designed to get dance-floor denizens’ bodies pumping while conjuring lusty thoughts. It may not be an enlightening piece of art, but it’s well-adapted to its goals.

The CD-single offers three mixes, of which the second (dubbed the “album version,” although no album is available yet) is the best because it lets Swain do a bit of between-the-lines role-playing that makes her more than the ever-available boy toy heard in the “radio mix.”

In imperious asides, she dumps one lover (“go to hell, I’m leaving you”), informing him that she has found a more satisfactory object for her sexy ministrations.

The recording itself is well-wrought. In a swooning, breathy voice that makes her sound like Melanie Griffith’s kid sister, Swain answers the high-pitched call of a Jimmy Somerville sound-alike to form the song’s effective melodic hook. The bass-heavy beat is sufficiently compulsive, set off by gauzy synthesizer textures.

A third take, the “On Top Version,” is an embarrassment--all moans and groans and heavy breathing, set against grinding rhythmic elements. Even Madonna might blush.

(Thump Records, P.O. Box 648, Walnut, Calif., 91788)

*

Shakespeare & the Lumberjack

“Preacher’s Daughter”

Scotti Bros.

This O.C. rap duo marshals some ear-catching elements on its debut single. Fragments of Southern soul, including a funky wah-wah guitar and a wailing female R & B vocal, are woven with sampled bluegrass banjo and harmonica (an alternate “Cornbread Mix” is a flagrant rip-off of the heavy, dissonant, wheeze-and-buzz sonic backdrop that’s a signature of Public Enemy’s style).

The song itself is pure rot, a snickering, derisive portrayal of a young woman who indulges an indiscriminate sexual appetite. Apparently, the only one who doesn’t know of her reputation is her father, a strait-laced but greedy minister. There’s no attempt at characterization: The girl’s a (insert all-too-typical rap-argot slur on females), the dad’s a hypocrite, and that’s that.

These guys don’t care about telling a story; they don’t even have the wit to tell a bad joke. Apparently, they just want to get ahead by talking dirty. Now, who’s really the ho, bro?