There’s good reason to be skeptical about new Violent Femmes music. The band has shown little interest in recording since their last album, 2000’s Freak Magnet, tanked both critically and commercially, and their recent reunion has left a sour taste in some fans mouths since Gordon Gano and Brian Ritchie dropped drummer Victor DeLorenzo in favor of Brian Viglione from The Dresden Dolls. But like it or not, it was inevitable that the band would return to the studio eventually. Today they released their first new music in 15 years (excluding a fluke cover of Gnarls Barkley’s “Crazy” they dropped in 2008), a four-song EP called Happy New Year, and though it doesn’t wash away the distaste of a DeLorenzo-less Femmes, it finds the group in fine form, sounding little aged since their perfectly good ’90s albums.
The band’s acoustic thump hasn’t changed much, and neither has Gano’s bratty sneer. “Happy new Year Next Year” opens the EP with a rock ’n’ roll pity party, and “Love Love Love Love Love” and “Good At/For Nothin” follow with a couple tracks of creeper jazz. Closer “Fast Horses” is the EP’s only real gambit: a “Wild Horses”-inspired riff on rebel-rock ballads that lets Gano spit a whole lot of pseudo profundities. He gets some good ones in: “Everything in life must go,” “You are beautiful to me,” “I will stand up for you,” etc. As silly Femmes tracks go, it’s one of the better ones, and the band never oversells the joke. This year the Femmes revealed they’ve begun recording a new studio album. Happy New Year makes that feel like a lot less of a depressing proposition than it might’ve seemed just a few months ago.
The EP, which was first issued as a vinyl-only release on Record Store Day, is available for purchase from all the usual digital outlets. It's also streaming on Spotify.
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