Local H

12 Angry Months

(Shout! Factory)

Record Review by Adam McKibbin

Breaking up is hard to do – especially when it involves tenacious types.  Judging from his musical career, Local H’s Scott Lucas isn’t one to change horses midstream.  Local H came to public prominence on the strength of their second album, 1996’s As Good as Dead, and its ubiquitous-at-the-time lead single “Bound for the Floor,” which sent a nation of grunge kids to their dictionaries to discover the definition of “copasetic.”  One of the brightest lights of the post-Nirvana grunge age, their momentum was torpedoed by some major label folding and floundering.

Long after Local H’s genre became cool… let’s try that again, even after Local H’s genre had become patently uncool, Lucas stuck with it – first backed by Joe Daniels on drums, then Brian St. Clair.  The band’s Wikipedia page sheds some light on the interesting dynamic between the two, with side-by-side comparisons including “On many occasions, Scott has been known to drink an entire bottle of Maker’s Mark during a set.  Drummer Brian St. Clair does not drink alcohol.” 

Lucas has found many inspirations for his songs; on Twelve Angry Months, he focuses his ire entirely on a failed relationship, with each of the 12 tracks representing one month of the unraveling.  It’s a basic conceit, but an effective one; in this age of the non-album, it does a neat old-fashioned trick of heightening the emotions of songs via context.   The unsteady peace reached on “Hand to Mouth” matters much more because the listener has been through the war, too. 

Twelve Angry Months is dominated by gloves-off rockers, but there are a few ballads appropriately interspersed (“The Summer of Boats” being the best, with a denouement so fiery and regretful that you half-expect Slash to start playing a solo outside a church).  “Do me a favor,” Lucas sings softly on the opener (“The One With ‘Kid’”), “Fall off of the earth and I’ll see you later.”  But if it was that simple, he wouldn’t have an album.  He goes on to admit that he wants to be missed, that he’s worried about custody of their friends and favorite bars and then, as the song picks up and morphs into a vintage Local H rocker, he gets to the heart of the matter:  where are all his missing records?  The song’s title refers to a Pretenders record that has gone AWOL in the ashes of the breakup.  Some things are just too hard to bear.

The indignity doesn’t end there.  In March (“BMW Man”), Lucas realizes that his shoes have been filled already, possibly by a BMW-driving, ESPN-watching Republican named Dustin.   In this case, in classic rock-and-roll tradition, the artist’s pain becomes our pleasure – leading to the sort of shout-along chorus, enrage riff and drumkit obliteration that never gets old coming from Lucas and St. Clair.