The Karl Hendricks Trio: The Jerks Win Again

Pittsburgh grad student, record clerk, and indie-rocker Karl Hendricks has slowed his musical output since the early '90s, when he put out six albums in six years. Released in 1998, Declare Your Weapons was the last anyone heard from the loping, high-volume Karl Hendricks Trio before it re-emerged with The Jerks Win Again, a fresh set of lengthy, indifferently constructed rock-outs with half-amused, half-raging observations about the blandification of America. Nothing much has changed in five years: Hendricks still works around weak vocals by employing a kind of hummy discourse, and still overcomes his fondness for 4/4 time by playing the beast out of his guitar. While Hendricks mocks the modern addiction to complacency in "The Overweight Lovers" and "I Think I Forgot Something… My Pants," he and the band wail away Crazy Horse-style, as though noise and bleed alone could ease the pressure. The album's title comes from "The Ballad Of Bill Lee," a Hendricks song about the eccentric '70s Red Sox pitcher who maintained his individuality but otherwise affected no real change in the greed-fueled realm of professional sports. It's a relevant story for Hendricks, and any points left unmade by the allusive lyrics are addressed by his typically distorted, trilling guitar solos, which almost always overcome his songs' relative formlessness with passages of raw melodicism. Though the tune-poor storm of The Jerks Win Again gets exhausting over a mere eight tracks, Hendricks' persistent statement of resignation is always notable. The dichotomy of the world as he sees it is summed up concisely in "Chuck Dukowski Was Confused," when Hendricks sings, "You keep on pretending it matters / and I'll keep singing about girls."