Andrew WK - I Get Wet

When I was 10 years old, there were a few brief months between when my house got cable and when Nirvana’s Nevermind was released. For that time after first discovering MTV, I was a dyed-in-the-wool metalhead. From drawing Motley Crue logos on my Trapper Keeper, to slamming my bowl haircut in time with that G-n-R song from Terminator 2, to secretly being terrified of the "Enter Sandman" video I stayed up late to watch, metal was my life. Then, just as soon as it happened, music and the whole world more or less changed forever. Yet as I became exposed to an increasingly larger variety of artists, and watched my tastes grow more "refined," I found few things that matched the levels of excitedly dumb happiness I found on those early episodes of Headbanger’s Ball ...until the Andrew W.K. album, that is. Put bluntly, I Get Wet is a laser-focused science equation adding together everything that "rocks," while subtracting everything that "sucks" (Beavis’ oversized skull would self-combust in amazement at mere listen to this album). Precision drumbeats meet track after track of metal distortion. Surprisingly melodic guitar leads are intertwined with keyboard synth squiggles and plunked out single note piano. On top of all this, heavily compressed vocals exhort the listener – in complete seriousness – to "Take It Off," "Party Hard," and "Don’t Stop Living in The Red." Roaring along like every ride at Great Adventure at once, I Get Wet made my inner metalhead smile contentedly for the first time in years. Yet that’s exactly where the problem comes in. While I love the album, and think it’s finely crafted and absolutely perfect for what it is, I can easily see where another listener could almost justifiably dismiss it as a joke. From "Party Hard," to "It’s Time To Party," to "Party Till You Puke," AWK’s lyrical repetition is fairly formulaic, and the relentlessness of it’s jackhammer audio accompaniment can be just as repetitive. Yet in spite of these caveats, I Get Wet is a worthy disc on power and enthusiasm alone (and, clocking in at just over a half-hour, you really don’t have time to complain). So suck it up, let it out, and bang your head to this. [www.andrewwk.com]