Boss Hog - Brood X

Pitchfork 78

The cover of the November 13, 2016 edition of The New York Daily News featured a photo of an enraged anti-Trump protester, mouth agape in mid-scream, hoisting a placard reading “Reject President Elect.” Whose scowl should it be but that of Cristina Martinez, lead singer in Boss Hog, the sleazy, funked-up blues punk band she formed with her husband (and ex-Pussy Galore bandmate) Jon Spencer back in 1989.

For many Boss Hog fans, it was the first glimpse of Martinez they’d seen in a long while. The band hadn’t released a new album since 2000’s Whiteout, and had only played sporadically in the interim. The front-page appearance was all the more surprising given that Boss Hog weren’t exactly model activists in their day—their entire oeuvre was an assault on good taste that included nude album covers, profane provocations, and covering Ike Turner at a time when he’d been branded public enemy number one. But in hindsight, Martinez’s Daily News snap was a perfect promotional poster for Boss Hog’s first new album in nearly two decades, a record that—like that portrait—captures its subject feeling alternately defiant, enraged, and, frankly, a little scared.

Back in the ’90s, Boss Hog’s evolution ran parallel that of the Blues Explosion, and by mid-decade, the two bands were at their creative zeniths, funneling their grimy blues-punk, Blaxploitation funk, and break-beat influences through an interconnected sewer system. And that symbiotic relationship extended to the lead couple’s playfully combative duet dynamic, with Martinez rebuffing Spencer’s come-ons like she was splashing a drink in his face. But even though the two bands are enjoying second winds this decade, their aesthetics have diverged considerably. Like Spencer’s most recent Blues Explosion blast, Brood X is about coming to terms with the changing nature of the city that he and Martinez call home. But where Spencer’s record was filled with nostalgic nods to the golden days of New York punk and rap, Brood X is consumed by feelings of dread and dislocation.

Certainly, it’s several degrees darker than the pop-oriented Whiteout, where Boss Hog had essentially streamlined into a trashier Garbage. Brood X also downplays the dusty-grooved blues/funk vibes of their mid-’90s releases to wade back into the primordial stew of goth, No Wave, and post-punk that coursed through the ’80s New York underground at the band’s infancy. At the same time, the addition of keyboardist Mickey Finn—initially recruited for a string of 2008/2009 reunion dates—gives Boss Hog the means to project their grit with a vivid, cinematic grandeur. The frantic opener “Billy” serves as the showroom model for their retooled capabilities: Over Spencer’s needling guitar riff, Martinez purrs out apocalyptic intimations (“I want all the darkness!”) like PJ Harvey fronting PiL, while the lock-step battery of bassist Jens Jurgensen and drummer Hollis Queens effortlessly alternate between a galloping death-disco and a gut-punching thrust. And then Finn’s ray-gunned keys thread it all together like a B-52’s channeling Richard Kern instead of Ed Wood.

Even though the songs on Brood X were written well before last fall’s election nudged the Doomsday Clock a few seconds closer to midnight, their unsettled energy is well in sync with these troubling, trembling times. The album may have been envisioned as a critique on the cost of living, but it now sounds like an anguished, existential address on the fear of dying: The organ-hummed “Ground Control” recasts eerily serene scenes of a gentrified New York (“Where did my city go?”) as a haunted-house horror flick, while “Shh Shh Shh” finds Martinez writhing atop a queasy, repetitive bass throb, her echoing distorted-telephone voice slowly degenerating into madness. And when Martinez asks, “How does it feel to feel good?” on “Black Eyes,” the song’s stalking, sludge-covered lurch suggests she won’t know the answer anytime soon.

Boss Hog’s sporadic track record—and Martinez’s decision back in 2000 to choose child-rearing over touring—can mean she’s often overlooked by listicle celebrations of great ’90s frontwomen (even as her soulful sneer has endured through progeny like Peaches, Karen O, and Alison Mosshart). Brood X feels like necessary recourse in that regard. With Spencer playing a mostly silent partner here, we get an unfettered, full-screen view of Martinez’s particular POV—not just as a paragon of pre-Giuliani New York, but as a working mom stepping back into the punk-rock trenches.

Brood X’s quiet closers are no less visceral than their high-voltage predecessors, providing a more intimate manifestation of the agitated feelings coursing throughout the record. On “Sunday Routine,” Martinez renders domestic doldrums as a Nick Cave psycho-drama, her spite becoming all the more audible as the details of her day turn more mundane. (“Hiding under wolfskins! Reading airport novels!”) When she seethes, “we lack for motivation / we need the agitation,” she gives voice to the simmering restlessness that’s thrust her back into the spotlight after so many years away.

Most striking is “17,” a ghostly acoustic blues that initially sounds like it was scraped off an old 78, but gradually morphs into a piece of musique concrète built from synth shocks, chopped-up vocals, and feedback scraps. “I was swallowed by the noise/I was just 17,” Martinez sings, offering a fever-dream reminiscence of her teenage-delinquent days in Pussy Galore. But in the song’s dying moments, she’s swallowed by a different sort of noise: an encroaching torrent of cicadas. Brood X is named for the variety of cicadas that spend 17 years underground before swarming to the earth’s surface to lay their eggs—only to die shortly thereafter. With the band hinting in interviews that their comeback could very well be a one-and-done affair, it seems all too obvious: They’re crawling out of the darkness covered in dirt, using their rare moment in the sun to unleash an infernal buzz.