Sometimes it takes a 15-Century masterpiece to bring it all back. In this case it was Heironymus Bosch's Final Judgement which Mike Watt dove into to create his third opera, Hyphenated-Man.
If there's one thing I took away from Tim Irwin's We Jam Econo is that the Minutemen believed that anything can influence music, and vise versa. As each song serves as an allegory or contemplation to a part of Bosch's greater work. But that's not all. It wasn't until the 2005 documentary that Watt began to revisit the music of his first love, The Minutemen. Written on D. Boon's old Telecaster Watt's latest effort sounds like a man returning home, not that he was ever lost.
You won't be able to escape the Minutemen comparisons. It's almost half the point of this album. What makes this not a total trip down memory lane is Watt's presence on the album. Watt is able to conjure and conduct a spectrum of sounds that varies from curious and playful to gruff and tense in a way that is unmistakably Watt. It only feels a little less brutish than D. Boon. Raul Morales and Tom Watson keep up with Watt bringing the energy that the music demands. If you close your eyes for a moment, you'd think your back in 1980s San Pedro.
30 songs broken down into 'econo-sized' bites can at first be a hard pill to swallow, but you got through Double Nickels on the Dime, right? If this does anything it demands your attention from start to finish, as a true album should. This is Watt treading grounds he knows best. A path he paved years ago. This time around he's picking up the pieces he may have missed the first time around. Most old rockers trying to revisit their roots won't sound half as good as Watt.
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