Jerkuleez
(Broke-Dick)Bruce Hughes is a fine, funky bassist, as has been seen on the road with Cracker and heard in numerous Bob Schneider-related projects. He loves to jam and has previously put out eclectic material with Teratoma and other oddball projects. Team him up with the likes of an all-star Austin team Scrappy Jud Newcomb, Malcolm Welbourne, and drummer Dave Robinson, and you’re in for some innovative instrumental fun. Mostly. Jams like “Duel in the Sun” and “Broke-a-Lot” are hot and cold running post-rock, ideal for tooling around in that old T-Bird you finally got around to fixing up. Pretty quickly, though, a sameness sets in, and the mood turns to one not unlike the kind you get sitting in the studio waiting for someone to finish mixing a particularly demanding tune. Song by song, ditties like “Chick-a-Pot Pie,” “Hit Miss Inbetween,” the title track, and onward, the trick is the same: A switch-hitter intro promises something new, and then the song settles into the same groove served up by the last three tunes. By the time you get to track 10’s different swing-a-billy of “Gravy Boat” (no relation to the local band of the same name) your mind will have drifted farther afield than the faux-spaced-out disc-ender “Astral Mariner.” Jerkuleez rises to the occasion in short bursts, but sorry to say, loses its strength over the course of the 12 tasks presented here.
This article appears in November 29 • 2002.