Get the Hell

Since 1994's La Mano Cornuda, the Supersuckers have been a band who at once embraced and flipped the bird at the guitar-swinging excess of classic hard rock, and 20 years later, after years of slugging it out on stages around the world, they've pretty much become the sort of veteran rock band they used to celebrate/parody, which is not a bad thing. 2014's Get the Hell, the Supersuckers' ninth studio album, is a solid blast of swaggering, amp-stacked rock & roll, as loud as anything they've unleashed since 1995's The Sacrilicious Sounds of the Supersuckers, and with no acoustic interludes or country influences to get in the way of The Rock. It's 36 minutes of chunky guitars (courtesy of Dan "Thunder" Bolton and Metal Marty Chandler), whipcrack drums (beaten into submission by Captain Von Streicher), and throbbing bass (from leader Eddie Spaghetti), and this music would sound just fine pumping out of a huge PA in some arena, though the truth is bands like this haven't been playing arenas much in recent years. The songs all rock like nobody's business -- even the Depeche Mode cover, believe it or not -- and Spaghetti's obsessions with bad behavior and rock dude decadance are as pronounced as ever as he OD's on wine, women, and song in "Gluttonous," downs beer and painkillers in "High Tonight," and confirms his own unreliability on "Disaster Bastard," "Bein' Bad," and "Fuck Up." And while Spaghetti's voice is starting to fray at the edges, in this context it works, allowing him to sound like the grizzled road dog he is (and always wished to be). Like most hard rock bands who've been at it for a quarter century, the Supersuckers haven't delivered a masterpiece or broken new ground with Get the Hell, but they also sound like they're a long way from running out of gas. The Supersuckers are still enjoying a life lived as reprobates with Les Pauls and Marshall stacks, and with this set, they're happy to let us in on the fun, and danged if they don't make poor choices sound like a real good time. ~ Mark Deming