Pynchon Music: Lotion

Lotion is fairly forgettable 90s band with a fairly forgettable 90s sound. There’s a few nice flourishes across Nobody’s Cool, but the album suffers from fatally tame production: like a layer of plexiglass protecting a painting, the drama of the individual brush strokes is smoothed over, placing the audience at an unfortunate remove. One gets the sense this band would have been much better on stage than in the studio. But the biggest problem with Lotion is they constantly remind you of better 90s bands: a little Weezer here, some Nirvana there; a touch of Pavement when they loosen up—and even then, they sound more like Kannberg’s streamlined Pavement than Malkmus’ bonkers Pavement, and only one of those visions spawned a cult following. One longs for something really unique to happen while listening to Nobody’s Cool, a longing only answered by the penultimate track, “Precious Tiny,” where the unexpected appearance of a banjo and a muted chorus finally breaks the glass and breathes fresh air. As the ten-minute sprawler collapses in a squeal of cranky guitar, you have to ask why the whole album couldn’t tap into this delightful stream of invention. The only other songs that peek above the post-grunge malaise are “Rock Chick” and “Namedropper”; but the former ends just when it’s getting interesting, and the latter never soars the way it wants to—the bland production clips its wings and leaves it fluttering. To be fair, “The Enormous Room” might also be a song you’d want to hear twice; but it’s canceled out by the awful “Sandra,” which sounds like a demo from Billy Corgan’s high school days. It’s unfortunate the album’s final song, the tepid “Switch,” offers the listener the lyric: “Give me free advice and check me for gray hairs / My boredom knows no bounds.” OK, my advice would have been to fire your producer, play more clubs, and release a live album.

To be honest, if it weren’t for Thomas Pynchon’s liner notes, few people would be still talking about Nobody’s Cool. And the best thing about these notes is not Pynchon’s analysis of the band—he offers some insights into their “lounge chords,” but it’s pretty obvious he’s no student of the Lotion discography. But Pynchon’s pithy depiction of fin de siècle New York City is deadly accurate, and clearly anticipates his future novel, Bleeding Edge.

Thomas Pynchon’s Liner Notes: “Nobody’s Fool”

The name of Lotion’s first album is Full Isaac, which besides getting instant screams of recognition from Love Boat rerun watchers everywhere, shows an attentive nostalgia at work—not to mention some dream of an endless cruise, upon which Nobody’s Cool is the next leg of the band’s creative itinerary. As beneath the austerities of twelvetone music may lurk some shameless piece of baroque polyphony, so, throughout this album, beneath the formal demands of rock and roll as we have come to know it, between the metal anthems and moments of tonal drama, the darkest of surrealist lyrics, the most feedback-stricken, edge-of-chaos guitar passages, may also be detected the weird jiving sense of humor of a cruise combo, even an allegiance to the parameters thereof, the lounge chords on “Namedropper” and “Rock Chick,” the bass line of “Juggernaut,” so forth.

But . . . it’s supposed to be the Millennium here—the Apocalypse, right?—worse it’s New York in the middle of a seasonal charm deficiency—and these guys are smiling? Well, not exactly. If it’s a cruise gig, it sure runs through peculiar waters, full of undetonated mines from the cultural disputes that began in the Sixties, unexplained lights now and then from just over the horizon, stowaways who sneak past security and meddle with the amps causing them to emit strange Rays, unannounced calls at ports that seem almost like cities we have been to, though not quite, cityscapes that all converge to New York in some form, which is after all where these guys are from.

The recording studio is half a block from the subway. Times Square is being vacated and jackhammered into somebody’s idea of an update. Next door to Peepland, up in a control room out of The Jetsons, the band, between takes, are discussing Bobby “Boris” Pickett, on whose 1962 hit “Monster Mash” it turns out Rob’s substitute music teacher in elementary school played saxophone. Everybody here knows the record, not necessarily the Birth of Rap, less an influence than something trying to find a pathway through to us here in our own corrupted and perilous day, when everybody’s heard everything and knows more than they wish they did. It’s never certain how these things will be carried on, but mysteriously it happens. Every night, somewhere on the outlaw side of some town, below some metaphysical 14th Street, out at the hard edges of some consensus about what’s real, the continuity is always being sought, claimed, lost, found again, carried on. If for no other reason, rock and roll remains one of the last honorable callings, and a working band is a miracle of everyday life. Which is basically what these guys do.

And here they are, now. Find the remote, get out the Snapple and Chee-tos, and like the Love Boat staff always sez, welcome aboard.

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