Mike Watt - The Secondman's Middle Stand

It’s easy to hate an album when you hate the artist. Maybe you met them at a concert, and they were a bunch of dicks, or maybe you just hate the crappy music they produce, but having a personal hatred of a person makes it easy to bash their music. When it really gets hard is when you have to review a disc by a world class level good guy and realize you just flat out don’t like the album. How do you tell the nice guy he finished last? By all accounts, Mike Watt is one of the nicest people you will ever meet in the music business. Sadly in 2000, an untreated infection left to Mike suffer a burst perineum, a condition as painful as it sounds. (For those vocabulary challenged, the perineum is also known as the taint, the chode, the spot between the cash and prizes and the dark side.) After recovery he set out and recorded a kind of rock opera about his experience. Unfortunately we aren’t talking about Green Day singing an album about modern America; we are talking about a burst perineum!! With song titles like “Burtstedman,” “Puked To High Heaven,” and the eloquent “Pissbags and Tubing,” you can guess that the lyrical content isn’t the most appealing. Granted, an album can have non-appealing lyrics and still stick some nice music in there to make a solid album, but unfortunately, the off the wall sounds on this disc don’t improve it much. The whole thing plays like an LSD trip with spoken word lyrics. Odd instruments and odd timing make each track like an abstract painting, interesting to look at, but nothing you would want to own. I’m sorry Mike, I know you’re a nice guy and all, but this album is the musical equivalent of TMI (Too Much Information). We are all glad you recovered and are still cranking out the songs, but this is one thing I could have gone without hearing about. It’s almost worth a listen or two just so you can identify with what I am talking about, but other than that it is, sadly, a disc best forgotten. [www.hootpage.com]