Hunx - Hairdresser Blues (Hardly Art)

I’m still not quite sure what the hairdresser blues are, but having heard the new solo album by Hunx in which he claims he’s got them, they strike me, on a purely phonetic level, as a perfect kind of blues for him to have. On the album’s title track, he avoids articulating the extraneous syllable-final r’s and leaves the ess a hissing pivot between e’s, so the word “hairdresser” ends up almost all vowel. Appropriately so: Despite the scratchy, hard stop rock ‘n’ roll world he inhabits, Hunx has always lived in his vowels, nasal and high-pitched, some would say whiny, others (me) would say tough and vital.

Hairdresser Blues is Hunx’s first album without His Punx, and I feel obliged to call him by his birth name, Seth Bogart, so awkwardly does his stage name dangle without its rhyming completion. He plays most of the instruments (Nu Sensae‘s Daniel Pitout handles the drumming), but what really makes this a proper Hunx solo album is the thorough yet wildly straying way in which Bogart sings it, with his classically untrained voice. I like to call it pure singingness, singing that erases the line between internal monologue and its articulation, singing that comes out as a spontaneous, artless effusion. Bogart has minimal control over his voice when it drops below the higher notes he’s accustomed to (as it often does on these new songs), but it’s beautiful and invigorating, the way his voice is attuned to its every expressive need, the way it jumps from high to low and decisively draws a song’s emotional contours. Have we ever known a mournful Hunx before? On “Set Them Free,” his response during the chorus (“set me free!”) is so sad, it sounds jailed by the jaunty guitars.

But mostly he sounds liberated. If the full-band sound he cultivates as a solo artist is less committed to a singular vision, more ramshackle, than his work with Hunx & His Punx (whose success largely depends on the live translation of that vision), that also means he can be less constrained on Hairdresser Blues, free to reach for a subtle variety of influences. Subtle, because any influence on the kind of rock music Bogart practices has to be subordinate to the prime directive of scratchy guitar and 4/4 thump. One influence that satisfies the conditions is the Dunedin sound, The Clean’s Vehicle particularly, and it plays out in the one-two big soft punch of “Let Me In” and “Always Forever” (think of it as a two-parter: the energy doesn’t abate), a breathless rush of light, ringing guitar, the album’s most exciting five minutes.

Across the album’s other minutes, he continues to channel 50s rock ‘n’ roll, less to unearth its hidden sexuality than to harness its far-reaching sincerity. Hairdresser is fairly restrained in its sex (its only sexual act takes place off-screen, in “Private Room”), skipping straight to love and loss. Music as sincerely horny (as opposed to insincerely horny, you stars of pop music) as Bogart’s is usually deeply romantic, so this latest apparent chastity comes as no shock, especially because his sincerity persists. Even in his live show, all performance and calculated pageant and mock spectacle, there’s a lack of artifice; honesty is even easier to commit in the private space of a solo record. That private space is flattering to the man within it, too. In concert he once came across as a ruthless ringleader of His Punx, forcing them to echo his every want, but now, left on his own, he’s nice, gentle, almost self-negating.

Hairdresser Blues promises something like an autobiographical peek with its title, but personal as these songs are, one of their primary features is a thrilling non-obsession with the self. Simply put, Bogart’s desires for others are so intense that they barely implicate him. They become universal longings, or implications of the desired party, but either way they’re so strong that they detach entirely from the man who felt them first. Those longings aren’t entirely romantic, either. Just as the second half of Dum Dum Girls’ Only In Dreams brilliantly switched the referent of “you” from a lover to a departing mother, while maintaining a simple and direct love song vocabulary, Bogart widens his own definition of love and dedicates one song to his friend Jay Reatard (“Say Goodbye Before You Leave”), one to his late father (“When You’re Gone”), and another to the Bay City Rollers (“Do You Remember Being A Roller?”). His Reatard tribute isn’t nearly as magical as Deerhunter’s “He Would Have Laughed,” but it lands closer to the hard plane of reality that was Reatard’s own musical realm. And the Rollers tribute isn’t nearly as magical as Nick Lowe’s “Rollers Show,” but its attitude of slightly skewed non-irony does reveal Bogart as one of Lowe’s spiritual heirs.

Among the romantic songs, one that I already mentioned is called “Let Me In,” and that’s exactly what the listener will demand Hunx do for them. But easy as it would be for this fascinating, semi-iconic performer to stoke his own ego and let us in, he’s focused squarely on the other. We catch of a glimpse of his cool in the eyes of the magnetic, nameless men he runs toward. Maybe that’s the key to the title: He’s busy doing someone else’s hair, taking a break from tending to his own.