#constant stimulation

This fifth album balances feel-good licks with feel-bad words, with brutal, gleeful force. The pessimism, you assume, was earned the same way the band honed its instrumental prowess, that is: in a decade of playing dark, sticky bars for $10 buck covers in an America where homeless encampments abut gleaming luxury towers.  (For instance, you can walk to either from Beerland, where Bad Sports has been known to play.)

The first five tracks of Constant Stimulation are the best, a continuous onslaught of Clash-like bravado and dashed expectations. “Don’t Deserve Love” is a swaggering, head waggling, fist-making punk anthem. Its main chorus hammers and aches in a way almost tailor-made for coming back at a band from a crowd in sweaty, drunken unison. Everybody sing now, “I don’t deserve love.” “All Revved Up to Kill,” rips just as hard, all ratcheting palm muted vamps and wooh-ing back-up singing, and it takes a minute to digest that it’s about a sex crime.  

The highlight, though, is “Gains and Losses,” vamping a “Pump It Up” bassline so thick and springy that you only have to slash a guitar chord through it every other measure or so to make it sing. The song is defiant in tone, but wracked with failure, rampaging over lyrics about physical deterioration and financial ruin. “Chop your hands off at the wrist, let the bleeding do what it does, aiming to die, aiming to die,” chants Orville Neely et al late in the track, and it’s a banger anyway.

Things slow down a bit in the second half, with a couple of fuzzy, radiant, lo-fi psych tracks (“Ode to Power” and “Everything We Wanted”) to break up the mayhem. There’s nothing wrong with the second half, but it mostly doesn’t wreck the way the early album does (“Easy Truth” is the main exception). At its best though Constant Stimulation delivers brute force tunefulness, blistering instrumental assault and a rancorous midlife rebellion against the way things have turned out. “If it feels like giving up, it’s giving in,” sings Neely on the opener, but it doesn’t sound like Bad Sports is ready for either.