Elizabeth McQueen and the Firebrands: Happy Doing What We’re Doing

Elizabeth Mcqueen and the Firebrands
Happy Doing What We're Doing
Gravitron!
2005-02-22

In a recent review for The Onion of Yo La Tengo’s new compliation, Prisoners of Love: A Smattering of Scintillating Senescent Songs 1984-2003, Noel Murray reflected on the impact of the band and its major-label-averse brethren, stating: “Indie rock in general has left little legacy, largely because the genre relies on individuals turning unique cases of rockophilia into sometimes-obscure personal statements. By making tiny models of the pop past they most want to live in, indie musicians don’t move rock forward in any appreciable way.”

It’s debatable how important it is for a particular artist to move rock forward, or how much that statement applies across the entire indie spectrum, but to my ears, it sounds like an incisive summation of what’s plagued pop ever since college rock morphed into indie rock. Many of the hippest sounds of today are actually loving recreations or recombinations of the past, and while that’s partially true about all music-making since music-making began, it now seems particularly acute in rock. Bands can presumably go on making good rock forever, but do we have a right to expect anything genuinely new from this style of music now that it’s over a half-century old? Jazz, a genre typically much more complex than rock, got started around the turn of the century and crashed into its dual-logical conclusions of free jazz (ideological purity at its extreme) and fusion (forsaking ideological purity for miscegenation) by the end of the ’60s. Since then, jazz has largely aped its greatest hits, and it’s no stretch to imagine that rock has entered the same phase.

What better way to wash away such weighty existential thoughts than with a dose of pub rock? Often relegated to the status of footnote by its punk progeny, pub rock kept alive the vital flame of human imperfection in music at a time when it was being extinguished on all sides by prog’s virtuosity, soft-rock’s slickness, and glam’s elaborate fantasias. It was ugly music before the world was ready for it, and if punk’s originality and brute force made pub rock seem like necrophilia, time has been kinder to it than many of punk’s incompetent screamers. Austin’s Elizabeth McQueen certainly seems to favor it, if her second album, Happy Doing What We’re Doing, is any indication. A disc of pub rock covers with one original in the pile, Happy celebrates forgotten heroes like Ducks Deluxe, Brinsley Schwartz, Dr. Feelgood, and Eddie and the Hotrods, as well as better-known proponents like Elvis Costello and Nick Lowe. The album’s 13 songs play like a good night at a local bar, with McQueen’s sturdy voice gliding over the Firebrands’ clockwork grooves. In short, they know their stuff and have a good time showing it. McQueen and her band do enough to make the artists they salute feel suitably honored, a nifty accomplishment, indeed.

But even if the record’s titular claim is true, should we as rock fans be comparably pleased? Some will surely be contented with a set of good songs played well, but others could justifiably wonder about the value of an album expressing nostalgia for a movement that contained plenty of its own during its first wave. More troubling still is the smoothness of the performances. This plagues just about every rootsy album made since the ’80s, and if that gloriously rough-hewn mix of country, blues, and R&B can thrive in the digital era, convincing proof has yet to be produced. For all its basic pleasures, it’s a shame that Happy Doing What We’re Doing doesn’t provide evidence that pub rock is still a living tradition, or that we have any reason to expect something better from the genre than box sets and compilations of old favorites.

RATING 6 / 10