Superlocalhellfreakride

They Say...

Review by Stewart Mason, All Music Guide

There is a certain level of pretentiousness to Hubcap City that must be somehow pushed through before one can even approach their music. First is the fact that technically, the band's name is written out as "Hubcap City (From Belgium)," which is pointless enough to be easily ignored. Secondly, large chunks of the Atlanta trio's debut album was recorded on lo-fi devices like a battery-operated Dictaphone and a cellphone. In its early-'90s heyday, lo-fi was as much an economic necessity as an aesthetic choice, but since these noisy parts of the songs were then deliberately laid against pristine digital recordings, it's now clearly an affectation on the part of Hubcap City. So too is the band's m.o. in its native city, where instead of playing the usual rock club scene, singer/songwriter Bill Taft and his cohorts, guitarist Matthew Proctor and drummer Will Fratesi, set up their usual performing gear -- guitars with detuned strings and Einstürzende Neubauten-style scavenged trash for percussion, mostly -- in bridges, tunnels, and condemned houses around the town's seedier areas. Also, here on their debut album, Hubcap City perform what they seem to think is a radical deconstruction of the children's playground song "Ring Around the Rosie." What it actually is, is three grown men playing a noisy, howling version of a song more suited to second-graders. What's surprising is that despite the unbearable posturing, much of Superlocalhellfreakride is actually fairly musically interesting. Taft is best known as the guitarist in Atlanta cult heroes the Jody Grind, who released two fine, jazzy early-'90s albums before a fatal car crash claimed two members; he and Fratesi were later part of the Captain Beefheart-like garage-blues act Smoke. Hubcap City are an entirely different effort: besides the detuned guitars and scrapyard percussion, a woozy trumpet and Taft's awkward, occasionally tuneless vocals are the main musical elements. Elements of Rain Dogs-era Tom Waits, the Spartan alt-blues of Smog, and Texas outsider Jandek are visible, and often, they combine into some disjointed but genuinely arresting tunes, such as the meandering instrumental "No Return." That those songs require slogging through lesser material like the seemingly endless free-form drones and squeals of "He Brings the Hatchet in the Evening" makes it hard to enthusiastically recommend Superlocalhellfreakride, but obscuro avant rock fans of a certain stripe -- those who listen to the Godz for pleasure, for example -- might find it of interest.