The Karl Hendricks Trio – The Adult Section LP (Comedy Minus One)
RECOMMENDED
The first new Karl Hendricks Trio record in almost a decade sounds like the music of a man somewhat reborn. Pittsburgh singer-songwriter Hendricks entered a phase of dormancy around the end of the ‘90s, dealing with family obligations and going to grad school instead of facing the steady decline in popularity for the kind of music he was making. There certainly wasn’t anything wrong with what he’d done – namely, giving a sometimes troubled, sometimes hopeful, sometimes spiteful voice to the quiet guy standing in the back of a room at an indie rock show, nervously looking on at everyone who knows how to socialize and not knowing how to connect. This voice chose to hang on to a muse that rebuffed him, and it powered the guitarist through a deal with Merge Records, four albums, an EP, and a handful of singles, one of which I helped finance (full disclosure: I’ve known Hendricks for about 20 years; he worked at the record store where I bought all my new releases, a store that he recently bought from his old boss and now runs himself). Following a two-guitar outing as the Karl Hendricks Rock Band, The Adult Section returns the balance of the group – now with bassist Corey Layman and welcoming back drummer Jake Leger – to a power trio, with Hendricks laying down a carpet of guitar shrapnel heavy enough to leave welts. Most of The Adult Section represents the most aggressive and musically confident work I’ve ever heard come out of Hendricks, as he channels a distinct history of rock music past, one that runs through Keith Richards, Bob Mould, and the entire recorded output of the band Silkworm. He sounds energized, though his narrative voice is still stuck in 1992, revisiting his source of frustration in the song “Dreams, Ha,” cramming too many words into the already tough-to-swallow “I Don’t Need a Hippie (To Tell Me How To Talk To My Cat),” and somehow still supporting the arrested development sad sack of his verses in tracks like “The Whole Fucking Thing” and “After Four Beers” (the only real ballad on this record, and a sad paean to the brief blast of confidence the narrator receives once he’s put away a few). After all this time, you’d think he could write about different kinds of people, that the whole wallflower mentality would have been replaced with emotions more complex, issues more pressing, than these by now, if for no other reason than simple narrative development. But staying put is what’s going on here, and it works; everyone here is playing in top form, and the second side of this is really the finest work Hendricks has done since the plaintive debut Buick Electra. As far as I’m concerned, The Adult Section marks the best example of what Hendricks offers, and highlights the most enduring – and the most trying – aspects of his music. 500 copies. (http://www.comedyminusone.com)
(Doug Mosurock)
