Hot Water Music: A Flight And A Crash : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

Hot Water Music aim to leave bruises, shake souls and change lives - not least of all their own. "Wait, it's all sounding the same!" the Florida quartet rails on its fifth studio album, A Flight and a Crash, as if dreary monoculture thinking was a personal challenge. The voices of Chuck Ragan and Chris Wollard ping-pong between the Clash's brawny bravado (there's even a reference to "unruly sods" in "Jack of All Trades") and Fugazi's high-strung desperation as the band runs through a gantlet of self-examination. ("What are we doing?" HWM ask in "Choked and Separated"; "All of us feel trivial and . . . tentative," they confess in "Paper Thin.") But the music fights back with everything it's got: Prison-break guitars roil "One More Time"; a dollop of whoa-oh! harmony sweetens the title song; "She Takes It So Well" broods and builds to a slow burn. Hot Water Music are on a mission, and with fourteen songs blitzing past in thirty-nine minutes, there's no time to lose.

GREG KOT
(RS 874 - August 2, 2001)