Written by: Dave Cantrell

There’s politics on this album. There’s regret. There’s commentary wrapped in the skeptical entrails of a reluctant realism. There’s a righteous (i.e. completely acceptable given who it is) self-indulgence that derives from the equation “genius + age = who gives a fuck I’m going there anyway.” There’s a rapscallion’s sense of play in play that by design fails to mask how dead serious all this fun and musical japery actually is. Yes, there’s all that but ‘all that’ is just the beginning, for in addition, there’s…

…the funk, hittin’ us right out of the box on the title track as Jim “Dallas” Cooper’s slinky phat bass slips inside Conn’s wordless Bobby McFerring-speaking-in-tongues intro like a grooving djinn channeling James McPherson but as well we find it anchoring the fly urbanism of “Brother” and, to a lesser if spacier extent, the techno informercial recital of “Disposable Future.” There’s…

…the illusory specter of Phil Spector, on “Good Old Days,” rescued from the pitfalls of his own supreme assholishness as Conn and company construct an offhand wall of sound, reverbed mono drum thump and all, the whole thing seemingly warm enough to bask in until one realizes that what they’re stirring all those sweet sunny tropes into is a scalding stew of indictments iterating how not-so-good those old days were for the artists, for POC, for women, for the ‘other’ of any stripe, the anyone that wasn’t in the Spector league of men. There’s…

…soul, of course there is, the Bobby Conn kind, vulnerable, brave, tragic and tragicomic all at once, a kind of endgame soul expressed this time around in the staggeringly honest “Disaster,” Recovery‘s first single and the last word in, shall we say, the Connian dialectic, where confidence and insecurity fight it out to a draw, where the mirror may show no mercy but the heart’s pride refuses to give in, all that clash and beauty presented in jukebox-ready form. There’s…

…the wildly refined, hydra-headed beast best known as ‘art rock’ that, of all genre classifications in this pop music gambit, is the one that, apart from causing epidemics of Weak Knee Syndrome to ripple through the entire music journalist eco-system, most meets the criteria of the old Potter Stewart maxim ‘I know it when I [hear] it.’ In Recovery‘s case it would apply – with varying caveats – to “No Grownups” with its pith, anger, and complicated doubt graphing a potent mix of SAHB to a rather angsty 10cc; to the portentous tension of “On the Nose” that could pass as one of The Rocky Horror Picture Show‘s more daring outtakes where the horror at hand is our current socio-political moment;  to the tricky flyover rock of “It’s A Young Man’s Game” that speaks its truth like a nightmare Iggy in an ill-fitting synth-woven dinner jacket, not crooning no songbook but rather raging (with a flourish for arch restraint) against the cruelty inherent in the pursuit of rockstar perfection, the song’s existential pathos made all the more formidable by the swerve in its final movement into a swooning sad ballad declension like Sparks at their most exquisitely weepy. In the end, then, there’s…

…this, in all its more-or-lessness: Recovery is, in a scrappily glamorous nutshell, Bobby Conn being Bobby Conn as only Bobby Conn can, and it’s glorious.