In the late '90s and early 2000s,
Ultimate Fakebook made two of the era's best rock & roll albums. Both
This Will Be Laughing Week and
Open Up and Say Awesome harnessed the sonic punch of classic AOR like
Cheap Trick and the melodic skills of
Guided by Voices to deliver rousing sets of songs that had the caustic wit of
the Replacements and the awkward feels of
Weezer. The band were fun, tough, bracing, and heartfelt. Anyone lucky enough to have fallen in love with those albums no doubt has a large number of their songs burned deep in their memory banks.
The Preserving Machine is the trio's first album in more than 15 years and nothing much has changed. The rhythm section of drummer Eric Melin and bassist Nick Colby are still rock-solid, guitarist
Bill McShane still deals out huge riffs and snappy solos, the songs use the same basic template as before, and they crash out of the speakers like drunk revelers at a school reunion.
McShane sings in the same sometimes snarky, sometimes painfully sincere style that brings to mind a corn-fed
Elvis Costello, and his songs walk the same line between delivering laughs and drawing blood. As befits a band of their age, some maturity creeps into the proceedings from time to time like on "Sad Soldier," which references fatherhood in heartbreaking terms, or the rollicking dose of nostalgia "After Hours at Melin's." (The latter makes clear where the band is coming from when
McShane asks the perennial question "
the Beatles or
the Stones?" only to come up with
Cheap Trick as the [correct] answer.) These moments cast a little bit of a sepia tone over the record, and it's hard not to get pangs of nostalgia when they rip through songs like "This Unfrozen Girl" or "Hey Gemini" that would have not only fit in on their classic albums but would have been highlights. Mostly, though,
The Preserving Machine is a near brilliant rock & roll album that you don't need to be a longtime fan of the band to enjoy. All you need to do is have an abiding love for rock & roll that rattles speakers, zings heart strings, and inspires big, goofy smiles along with the occasional tear, because that's what
Ultimate Fakebook deliver here. They've not only come back strong, they've come back as good as they ever were, and that's an almost impossible feat. ~ Tim Sendra