O.C. Album Reviews : The Muffs and Claw Hammer Raucous and Roll Us

A world where unpretentious, wildly rocking but historically savvy bands like the Muffs and Claw Hammer can work for major labels can’t be all that bad. The Muffs, with their second Reprise album, and Claw Hammer, with its major bow for Interscope, don’t disappoint. Ratings range from * (poor) to **** (excellent). Three stars denote a solid recommendation.

*** 1/2, The Muffs,”Blonder and Blonder” Reprise Beavis and Butt-head, meet your first serious crush, if you’re not too stupid and heartless to have one.

Boomer parents of teen-age punker hellions, behold at last the common ground where you and the little slammers can meet in raucous tranquillity, sharing the dopey smiles that involuntarily appear when rockin’ rawness bashes the brain while pop hookiness teases the ear.

Could “Blonder and Blonder” be an Important album, like Dylan’s “Blonde on Blonde”? Maybe so, if it seduces and civilizes MTV’s head-banging cartoon louts to the virtues of classic pop and even more so if it creates a stereophonic zone of comfort between schismatic rock-loving generations.

But then again, this is the Muffs we’re talking about, and there’s no band on Earth less concerned with Importance and more engaged in garage-rocking just for the goofy fun of it.

The Muffs have been around since 1990, when O.C. rockettes Melanie Vammen and Kim Shattuck bailed out of the all-female Pandoras and began leavening Ramones-style blitz-rock with a sense of pop zest harking back to the mid-’60s British Invasion.

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Vammen departed after the band’s tastily raucous 1993 debut, leaving singer-songwriter-guitarist Shattuck and founding bassist Ronnie Barnett to carry on as a trio with new drummer Roy McDonald, the brother of power-popsters Jeff and Steve McDonald of Redd Kross.

Shattuck, an Orange resident, is the perfect older woman for Beavis and Butt-head. The bloodcurdling screams with which she punctuates her songs of disaffection for various creeps and untrustworthy lovers outdo anything White Zombie can muster and probably would scare Henry Rollins and Pantera.

And Shattuck, though past 30, thinks a lot like a 14-year-old. Emotions tend to run strong and simple in Muffsville: You did me wrong, I hate you, drop dead; or, conversely, I screwed up, I’m worthless, maybe I should drop dead. These opposite scenarios turn up back-to-back with “On and On” (“If he’d die suddenly, I’d live happily”) and “Sad Tomorrow” (“Maybe one day I’ll die, who cares”).

But as the album goes on, Shattuck works her way toward recognizing that life is more complex than the black-and-white, cool-or-sucks world of Beavis and buddy. With the feedback-sprayed waltz “Funny Face,” she’s more plaintive than dismissive, conceding sorrowfully in the end that sometimes things go rotten and it’s nobody’s fault.

On the whole, “Blonder and Blonder” is a tad less messy than “The Muffs,” with guitars that often recall the Searchers, George Harrison and the early Byrds discovering the Beatles, except with a dollop of modern-rock mayhem applied.

If you want to know what John Lennon would have sounded like had he stepped into a time warp in 1964 and beamed ahead into the age of grunge, check out the furious “Ethyl My Love.”

Hole comes to mind in that track and on “I’m Confused,” but Shattuck’s fondness for Brit Invasion sources lets pop-exuberance get equal time with psychodrama. McDonald provides some wonderful, Keith Moon-ish drumming that cascades and rolls and tumbles while sounding like firecrackers going off.

Rocking for fun, but also rocking with strong emotion, the Muffs have made their sophomore album a pure pleasure--14 catchy, quick-hitting numbers with not a muffed one in the bunch.

* The Muffs, Pansy Division and Dodge Dart play tonight at 8 p.m. in an all-ages show at Our House, 720 W. 19th St., Costa Mesa. $6. (714) 650-7221.

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***, Claw Hammer, “Thank the Holder Uppers”, Interscope Taken in the proper dosage, this raucous but tradition-minded body-slammer of a blazing-guitars band exemplifies what wired rock ‘n’ roll should be. But overexposure can have unpleasant side effects.

For hard-rock fans, 20 or 30 minutes of Claw Hammer on any given day should help keep the cobwebs away. But “Thank the Holder Uppers” goes on for almost 50 minutes. The best advice is to split the album in two, figuratively speaking, and save half for later.

Jon Wahl’s high-pitched, highly stylized screeching may have an instant emetic effect on listeners who don’t associate the word screeching with any music they can stomach. But fans who like extremist rock expression should get a kick out of a singing approach that sounds like Little Richard and AC/DC’s Brian Johnson locked in a death-grip of mutual strangulation. As noted, a little Wahl goes a long way.

Launched in Orange County in 1986, after Wahl’s exit from the Pontiac Brothers, Claw Hammer, now based in Los Angeles, is built on the barreling interplay of twin lead guitars, as Wahl and co-founder Chris Bagarozzi scrape and pummel without letup. Bob Lee drums with a loose, punkish feel, while Rob Walther’s bass is the steadying influence, active but precise.

The object sometimes is pure sensation overload, but Claw Hammer, debuting as the world’s least likely major-label act after four previous albums on independent labels, also knows how to write songs that are catchy in an offbeat way and that show the band’s roots in blues-based sources.

“Sweaty Palms” attains a bleakly poetic quality as Wahl surveys the L.A. landscape with a jaundiced eye: “Empty pools and sour tangerines / Lazy palms pinned against the whiskey-brown sky.”

With piano banging at the end, the piece takes on a heavy, Doors-like feel, inviting a comparison between Jim Morrison’s romanticized ‘60s vision of “fantastic L.A.” with Wahl’s smudged contemporary portrait.

“Bums on the Flow” couples apocalyptic imagery of a flood with music that sounds like a bizarro-world version of Sam Cooke’s soul classic, “Bring It On Home to Me.”

Claw Hammer’s best writing and strongest playing surface in “Hollow Leg,” a surprisingly affecting anthem about an alcoholic’s desperate attempt to put down the bottle.

The lyric’s portrait of a man determined to stand on wobbly feet, yet dogged by his frantic, overcharged desire for booze, is underscored as half the band--drums and one guitar--rushes headlong and hell-bound, while the other half moves with a slow, swaying gait that could represent the first unsteady steps toward sobriety.

The album includes a number of extended, blues-based jams, with wailing harmonicas and dissonant saxophones adding to the sense of overload. Use this immoderate music in moderation if you don’t want your attention exhausted or your brain pan-fried.