Looking like the Strokes in their Is This It-era heyday, the young Chicago trio Lifeguard are ready-made for critical adoration and indie record shop “best-of” lists. Every so often, a band like this emerges: one that isn’t really experimental or new at all, but manages to flaunt their impeccable influences in a way that is so brash and confident, it feels fresh and exciting nonetheless.
You know this type of group. They play their instruments in such a way that makes you wonder, are they really not that good, or are you just being close-minded? Their songs are too short to get a handle on. Sometimes a car speeds past, and you can’t be sure if it’s a Porsche or a Nissan; the effect with Lifeguard’s debut album Ripped and Torn, is similar. Is a track like the stop-starting, scraggly-strumming “It Will Get Worse” brilliant in its own right or effective only since it contains the shapes of so many brilliant songs of yore?
Ripped and Torn is named after a cult Scottish punk and post-punk-era fanzine, which had an entire run of 17 issues. But of course it is. It was produced by Randy Randall from indie noise heroes No Age, of course it was. The lyrics are inscrutable, alternating the just-plain-silly (“Carrying around flashlights… / Oh, I am, I am / Worked up in the mouth”) with the seemingly profound (“I am wide under your reach”), daring you to dismiss them out of hand and risk missing the point.
All of this is to say Lifeguard are, in a word, posers, but also to acknowledge that they come from a long line of posers, some of whom have made some excellent music. To beg the inevitable question: Does it really matter?
In the case of about a third of Ripped and Torn, it does not matter. The opening salvo of tracks is played with such vigor and produced with such precision that even the most cynical listener will surrender. The see-sawing chords and Hooky bass breakdown of “A Tightwire”, Kai Slater’s half-yelped, faux-British-accented vocals on “It Will Get Worse”, the droning guitars and intertwining voices of “Under Your Reach”: No amount of willful dissonance and poor tuning can spoil them. Under Randall’s supervision, the vintage tones and loud/soft, sparse/dense dynamics are right on target as well.
It’s all a good bit of fun. However, the issue is that the record contains 12 songs. Well, nine, actually, because a quarter of them are nothing more than short bits of noise and piss-taking—just in case you were thinking maybe Lifeguard weren’t bold enough to do such things. The interstitials are probably just meant to fill up time and space on the tracklist; even with them, Ripped and Torn clocks in at barely half an hour.
As for the rest of the actual songs, the balance between genuine tunes and strangled-cat guitars eventually tips in the wrong direction. Having burst through the door and made a grand entrance, the album doesn’t have a second move to make. The title track nearly evinces some emotion rather than mere attitude, but doesn’t get any closer than some vague lyrics about being “home in the front yard”.
Closing track “TLA” presents a very apt summation of how Ripped and Torn tries so hard, it ends up tripping over its own creepers. “TLA” is short for “Three Letter Acronym”. Which acronym are they singing about? We don’t know. Rather than write a song about something real, Lifeguard sing about a faceless representation, a placeholder for something more substantial. But, hey, “TLA” is itself a three-letter acronym. Is it meta, postmodern, or insipid?
At least Ripped and Torn offers a brief thrill. Also, the questions it begs are relatively interesting ones. Even if the record has no other function than to lead people to vintage Pop Group, Pere Ubu, Joy Division, and Wire albums, well, that’s not such a bad lot in life. The end-of-year accolades will be nice, anyway.