Even in their earliest days in Los Angeles’s punk scene, X had one eye on rock music’s past. Guitarist Billy Zoom’s twisted riffs made nods to Chuck Berry, while Doors keyboardist Ray Manzarek produced and played organ on the band’s first four albums. On their ninth (and supposedly final) studio album, Smoke & Fiction, X looks back on their own history but fails to recapture what made them such an exhilarating fixture of L.A. punk in the first place.
X’s 1980 debut, Los Angeles, furiously tore down the illusion of the eponymous city’s glitz and glamour, with its bleak songs about bigotry, addiction, and sexual assault performed with an unsettling glee. On Smoke & Fiction, the band reflects on those days with some degree of nostalgia: “We were never just kids, we were pretty young/We did what we did just to get along,” singer-bassist John Doe sings on “The Way It Is,” his voice now deeper with age.
“Big Black X,” the title of which nods to X’s 1982 album Under the Big Black Sun, finds the band reminiscing about their heyday—according to the lyrics, they really did party in Errol Flynn’s abandoned mansion—through a drug-induced haze. “A big black X on a white marquee/A naked Christmas tree on fire in a Cherokee alley,” Exene Cervenka recalls.
The band’s embrace of traditional rock ‘n’ roll elements, like the barrelhouse piano of the earlier album’s “Riding with Mary,” used to carry a subversive impulse when juxtaposed with Doe and Cervenka’s dark poetry. But the flipside is that this can suggest a lack of musical imagination, as it does here on “Struggle” and “Winding Up the Time.”
X never subscribed to a purist version of punk, and Smoke & Fiction lands closest to their mid-’80s output, when they started exploring country and rockabilly. D.J. Bonebrake’s drumming, even at its most propulsive, retains a distinct swing on tracks like “Ruby Church” and “The Way It Is.” Too often, though, the band repeats themselves: Zoom’s riff on “Struggle,” for example, feels like a rewrite of the one on 1980’s “Johny Hit and Run Paulene.”
In true punk tradition, Smoke & Fiction is brief, clocking in at just half an hour. But even if most of the album’s 10 tracks are uptempo, they recycle familiar sounds too conservatively to generate much momentum. In the end, X’s newfound reflectiveness comes at the expense of urgency.
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We are all 65 to 75 now. One would hope that our days of a sense of urgency are long past. Good for X if they are!