**Ruth RuthLAUGHING GALLERY
"I pretend that
I'm complicated when in reality I'm fucking blind," admits
Ruth Ruth's
bleach-blond singer/bassist, Chris Kennedy, in the first verse of "All
Readydown," one of a dozen of wound-up, guitar-powered ditties on the NYC
trio's debut. On the disc's hard-hitting final track, the anti-conformity rant
"G.I. Youth," he goes on to confess "I'm no tragic poet, I'm a bore." How's
that for taking the wind right out of a critic's sails? Actually, Kennedy
doesn't come across nearly as messed up and pathetic as he seems to want us to
believe. (In contrast, the pointless fury he feels toward the
Catcher in the Rye-loving
gal in "I Killed Meg the Prom Queen" seems obsessively
real.) And the sturdy punk-pop constructions that frame his surface-level
soul-searching simply don't support genuine melodrama. He just sounds as if he
were fishing for compliments, or at least compassion, in the shallow end.
-- Matt Ashare
(Ruth Ruth headline
Axis this Friday, January 26, with openers
Sal's Birdland.)
|
