CD Reviews

Scott Lucas & The Married Men | Blood Half Moon

The End Records (2012)

By BARRY THOMPSON | May 29, 2012

3.0 Stars

The good ol' days of 1996 — the year Local H's "Bound for the Floor" played once every half hour on modern-rock radio — was a long-ass time ago. Then again, according to YouTube, a version of this record's closer — "There Ain't No Grave (Gonna Hold My Body Down)" — was recorded in 1942. So let's keep the phrase "retro" in a broader perspective here. But if you consider Local H — Scott Lucas's claim-to-fame project — a nostalgia band (which you shouldn't), the nostalgia of Scott Lucas & the Married Men is deliberate, anti-irony, and stems from rustic instrumentation instead of incidental associations with dated pop culture. Blood Half Moon hits its apexes during the bridges of, like, every-other song, whenever guitar and violin solos intertwine and snowball into magnitudes hardly typical of records with lots of violin parts. Counted among the coolest cuts: dread-summoning "Lover, the Lullaby," wistfully world-weary "Out of the Boat," and "There Ain't No Grave . . . ," which, as it turns out, is the intellectual property of "public domain," not Johnny Cash. Who knew?!

SCOTT LUCAS & THE MARRIED MEN + HOOKERCLOPS | O'Brien's Pub, 3 Harvard Ave, Allston | June 12 @ 8:30 pm| 21+ | $10 | 617.782.6245

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