Review Summary: Bursting with brilliance and southern swagger Little Feat is out to prove your pretensions on "Dad Rock" wrong with "Time Loves A Hero."
There is a term now eternally in the lexicon of vinyl junkies and audiophiles everywhere. Spat with vitriol by mustachioed Mac Demarco hipsters from Brooklyn to Seattle. You know this term.
"Dad Rock"
A label so graciously deployed to attack anything beloved by the Boomer generation - all that is, through narrow hipster eyes, seen as hokey, brutish, or trope-laden.
Behold - "Time Loves A Hero:" a 35 minute refutation of the term. No. Dad Rock is no longer a derogatory term; if your dad is a fan of this album it just goes to show that the old man knows what he's talking about. After all, Dad's moustache could kick Holden's peach fuzz straight down the interstate, given the chance.
Little Feat's sixth studio effort is the Dad Rock redeemer simply because of how much it brings to the table. In just nine tight tracks it explores New Orleans blues, dirty urban funk, and contemporary Jazz Fusion - all without ever losing its swagger or compromising its fun loving southern rock identity. After all, Little Feat has always been more than simple southern rock. They are as much an intelligent Steely Dan as they are a thinking man's Marshall Tucker Band - with band leader Lowell George acting as an alternate universe version of Todd Rundgren in which he swapped LSD with whiskey as his drug of choice.
The album kicks off with "Hi Roller," characterized by an assertive funk lick packed between complex keyboard lines and intricate drum work - painting the life of a man that lives rambling from city to city, truck stop to truck stop, and casino to casino without fear or regret. You can tell that this is a band playing at the peak of their confidence and ability, harkening back to an era when you could use bongos in a rock track un-ironically.
After an explosive start the band downshifts into their familiar southern front porch grooves - but within these grooves lie a variety of interesting detours. The band favors intriguing micro-jams over tired verse-chorus-verse structures, often shifting up their tone and time signatures while never letting go of their groove. Little Feat was quick to grasp the brilliant lessons of more avant-garde artists at the time: that if you strap listeners in with a strong enough foundational rhythm you are granted license to take the jam as far as you please. Knowing this, the band launches themselves out of the American south and into a new sound entirely.
This sound is exemplified by the crowning jewel of the record: "Day At The Dog Races." Bursting out of the gates with baroque flourish the track is nothing short of a cosmic odyssey in which southern rock grooves and wild jazz fusion experimentation coalesce into a fresh and engaging whole. Wild trips up and down boards of keys, frets, and strings carry you from one twist to another with pristine confidence - an endless cowbell clang ever-present to catch your fall, should the band's ambition outpace your ear.
These eclectic song structures should seem pretentious but they aren't - given the often playful lyrical content. "Old Folks Boogie" is a great example; muscular and tongue-in-cheek it finds its humor as a lament to the tragedy of old age:
"You know that you're over the hill"
"When your mind makes a promise that your body can't fill"
Like the remainder of the album these lyrics are complimented by excellent musicality. The gospel-tinged organ and brass are tied down to the dirty earth by a groovy bass line and guitar work that is simultaneously fierce and playful.
There is a clear balance in "Time Loves A Hero," between the experimental and the silly. And the band finds a perfect middle ground, allowing the two characteristics to bounce off of one another; when the two styles aren't merged in a single track you'll see tracks of each type book-ending one another, resulting in a pleasing balance between the two sounds. A lesser band would either drown themselves in the jazz fusion experimentation or coat themselves in a sheen of irony in an attempt to accommodate the tongue-in-cheek lyrics, but Little Feat, cocksure and confident, owns their identity - sacrificing none of their character in their sonic exploration.
It is that dilemma, the crisis of identity versus musicality, that makes it so rare for modern rock bands to reach Little Feat's unique point of brilliance; they weren't trying to be anything to anyone other than great musicians for its own sake. So its no wonder that even in their heyday they came across as an "old" band, sporting the sounds of pitch-perfect 30-somethings playing for kicks more than fresh faced 20-somethings playing to please a specific audience. And this does cause issues to crop up for certain listeners - confident self-indulgence is still self-indulgence. As eclectic as Little Feat is their southern rock grooves may lag and drag on for some listeners. After their raucous and technically thrilling opener you wouldn't be wrong to expect the band to continue revving their engines on every track that follows, rather than only doing so when it pleases them, which results in a handful of dull moments. A handful that feels oddly pronounced given the album's brief 35 minute run time.
Still, 35 minutes of brilliant musicianship is 35 minutes well spent, even if you lose a few of them to lethargic noodling. Now go sift through some old bins of vinyl and ask your Dad about the rest of his record collection.
