Album review: Sweet Apple – Love & Desperation

Apparently J Mascis tells people that starting his latest band Sweet Apple saved a life. The life in question is that of eponymous bassist John Sweetapple, who hit the road on a cigarettes-and-driving marathon after his mother died from a lengthy illness: cue a heartwarming story where four long-term musical buddies get together in order to drag one of them out of the doldrums, and of which the Sweet Apple album Love & Desperation is the result.

You might be expecting a rather bleak selection of tunes after reading that admirably guileless backstory, but your expectations would be largely confounded. As seems inevitable in any project involving man-mountain Mascis, Sweet Apple play a loud, fuzzy and raucous mix-up of seventies rawk and sunny guitar pop, complete with four-chord sequences, simple sing-along chorus hooks, middle-eights with ragged blues-scale solos and joyously overstated outro fills. Love & Desperation sounds like a road album, the sort of thing you’d crank up loud in your best friend’s car as you drove to the coast for a sun-soaked day of beach-side truancy, be it from work or school. It’s not big, and it’s not clever; it’s rock’n'roll, dude. Cranked amps, crashing drums. That’s all you get… and what more do you need?

Not much, really – as bluesy alt-rock with its tongue in its cheek goes, this is decent stuff, though it’s not going to set the musical world alight. But thanks to that press release story, I can’t resist the temptation to deconstruct each song with reference to Sweetapple’s recent loss – to wonder how much of Love & Desperation is coded, how much of it is an attempt to exorcise the lingering trauma of a very different separation. “It’s Over Now” is a tongue-in-cheek break-up song and “Can’t See You” is similar, complete with references to sleeping in cars and chain-smoking; “Hold Me, I’m Dying” is jangle-grunge silliness with a rockabilly undercurrent; “Somebody Else’s Problem” is a pick-up drivin’ roadhouse jam powered by the same wryness that Queens Of The Stone Age rely on… but peel away the surface, and perhaps you can hear Sweetapple working out some of his emotional burdens in the lyrics, many of which seem to refer (with vary degrees of obliqueness) to his relationship to his late mother

Even if (like a responsible post-modern critic) we factor in the death of the author, it’s not unreasonable to suggest that Sweetapple’s mindstate would influence Sweet Apple‘s songs, given the closeness of the events and his centrality to the songwriting process. But then again, mortality (and the sublimation of such through hedonism and devil-may-care insouciance) is a rock’n'roll staple… and so it’s a circular argument, and the true answer can only lie in Sweetapple’s mind.

And that’s where it should remain, really – not just because it’s disrespectful to pry, but because it demeans Love & Desperation to interrogate it for meaning too closely. It’s a rock’n'roll record, and I suspect that in the absence of any prompting to the contrary, I’d have read it as a simple send up of classic rock’n'roll tropes. And that’s probably the best way to listen to a record like this – to take it at face value, without the creation narrative backstory. They only put that stuff in so us hacks have something to write about, anyway…