Review Summary: Oüt of Limb..
IV
Beneath SST Records, hardcore name-slinging, stylized umlauts, beer-drunk tours and DIY recording budgets, behind hirsute identity crisis and Jay’s Longhorn in Minneapolis, there was always an undying power pop heart beating in Mould’s and Hart’s chests.
Metal Circus, the holdover between Husker Du’s uneven and largely faceless
Everything Falls Apart and the buzzing behemoth of
Zen Arcade, eschews big choruses and opts to create songs that felt colossal in their entireties. For how short and frenetically paced Husker Du keep the proceedings, every turn of the record sounds like a serrated monolith, and midway through
Metal Circus, somewhere along the first verse of “It’s Not Funny Anymore,” the abrasive sheen of hardcore skin starts flaying off, giving a glimpse of the bright-eyed, fearlessly immense ideas roiling underneath. It’s not that the Du didn’t have the ire, the unrest or the scrupulously myopic honour of their more overtly hardcore label-mates, it’s that they were never meant to plat the prophetic obelisks, never meant to don black T-shirts, buzz off their hair, and spout politico rants in between drastic gym sessions. Never meant to play the trivial saints, preaching clean living, straight-edged sanctimony and Molotov peace. And nowhere is that perceptual gap more evident than in the creases of “Diane.” There was a reason that song burrowed its way so deep into college radio rotation and the zeitgeist of Midwestern kids. A compressed treasure of alternative rock, it glides and pulsates, and pummels only in the most melancholic conceivable way, a synecdoche of guitar-strapped romantic thrashing that was about to start sprouting from the Midwest like tansy ragwort. It wasn’t that the world quit burning, that Reagan had suddenly grown angel wings, or that the Cold War had ebbed. It’s just that this band found a way to flail against it all and still feel human somehow. And like the first through the wall elsewhere, the Du got bloodied and beat along the way, oft imitated and never duplicated after all.
