Unlike some musicians whose output all but verbally announces their artistic influences, James Alex doesn’t pretend those influences are happenstance: he’s described his Beach Slang efforts as “fawning over the Replacements,” and that’s as evident on The Deadbeat Bang of Heartbreak City as it was on Beach Slang’s two earlier LPs (and many earlier EPs).
The open fawning gives Alex license to recruit actual Replacements bassist Tommy Stinson, or to roll in Philly gutters not significantly different from the Minneapolis gutters where Replacements frontman Paul Westerberg found inspiration.
Punky-pop songs like “Kicking Over Bottles” and “Let It Ride” capture the stumbling energy, barroom poetry and slashed-amp noise that help Beach Slang surpass suggestions that it wants merely to duplicate a defunct band’s achievements.
However, other fast-loud tracks, including “Born to Raise Hell” and “Stiff,” can’t really toss aside the weight of clichés drawn less from 1980s Midwestern-underground sources than from insistent, if mostly self-aware, loyalty toward the rock ’n’ roll desire for reckless behavior, and the rock ’n’ roll audience’s expectations of such behavior.
Alex does better when he leans toward the relatively thoughtful acoustic approach he’s explored under the name Quiet Slang. “Nobody Say Nothing” belies its own sullenness with strummed chords and limpid cello that ring within the chambers of a dented heart and fade out for another two minutes in “Nowhere Bus.”
The final song, “Bar No One,” reconfigures elements of “Nobody Say Nothing” alongside distant piano, crisp brass and whispery backing vocals, and the combination resembles a preparation for a deathbed the singer seems to know he’s making for himself. Here, Beach Slang touches upon Beatlesque collage as well as Replacements-style elegy, and brushes greatness with bruised fingers.
