X: Hey Zeus! : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

Five years after X put West Coast punk rock on the map, the group had all but abandoned its hard, fast, Ramones-meets-Jefferson Airplane grind for a more accessible sound. In the process, X lost their identity, becoming a sort of roots band with bohemian pretensions. The group floundered after the mid-'80s, putting out a couple of respectable, if pedestrian, LPs and a clumsy, all-acoustic collection under its country-folk alter ego, the Knitters. In 1988, X bowed out gracefully with a bang-up, double-length live album recorded at their old Hollywood stomping grounds, the Whisky a Go-Go.

Then grunge happened. Nirvana took X's earlier "We're Desperate" rallying cry to No. 1 with "Smells Like Teen Spirit," and the message to old punks was: You no longer have to clean up your sound to get a shot at commercial success. So for Hey Zeus!, X's reunion album, the band traded the stylized pop-metal arrangements of its last two studio outings for fuzz boxes and distortion pedals. Though the tempos remain generally slower than those of X's earlier years, the words, melodies and feedback convey the group's desperation with as much conviction as ever. But for the members of X, now well into their 30s, times have changed – and so has the nature of their despair.

More than a decade after John Doe wailed about "Sex and Dying in High Society," his sentiments have become more grounded in reality. "I try to love my country/But it's turned its back/On the sick and hungry," he croons in "Country at War." Likewise, when Exene Cervenka mourns the fallout of a bad economy in "Clean Like Tomorrow" ("Miss Lonely-hearts/Lies in the doorway/Her pages torn"), the images contain more compassion than they would have coming from the oh-so-bored Cervenka of 1980. Of course, the Los Angeles of X's early years was a different beast: AIDS had not yet even been named, and South Central was at the midpoint between Watts and Rodney King; today, Hollywood is a lot closer to South Central, and sex and dying in high society has become all too real.

Not to say Doe and Cervenka have entirely exorcised the "hopeless romantic" within X. The self-important paranoia of early punk resurfaces in "Someone's Watching" ("Every minute of every day ..."), and Doe's juxtaposition of "street life" with the "good life" in the melancholic "New Life" oversimplifies real life. Moreover, when X attempt to veer too far from straight rock & roll, the group loses its focus. The overly long "Lettuce and Vodka" falls apart, and "Everybody" finds Cervenka and Doe's signature vocal blend teetering between arty discordant and just plain embarrassing.

Still, X seem to have come to terms with their postpunk identity on Hey Zeus! Sometimes, like people, rock & roll bands just have to walk through their midlife crisis.