Quasi Issue #27

When the Going Gets Dark (Touch and Go)

By Elizabeth Barker
Published: March 1st, 2006 | 12:00am

Quasi’s seventh album begs the unfortunate question: How can drummer and rock goddess Janet Weiss pound out a scorching protest record like Sleater-Kinney’s The Woods in 2005, only to burn us out with the lazy, blues-lite hippiedom of When the Going Gets Dark less than a year later? Blame her band mate-ex-husband for the bad energy. Wailing half-baked fuck-the-man rhetoric, singer-pianist-guitarist Sam Coomes fumbles through 11 mostly tiresome numbers and pounds the ivory like a 5-year-old abusing his parents’ baby grand. By the time he claims he’s “tired of singing the death culture blues” on the record’s penultimate track, you’re praying that means he’s finally about to stop and go away for a while.

The journey to “Death Culture Blues” is a long and often dreadful bore, bogged down by prog-rock guitar noodling, pseudo-jazzy piano, and cringe-worthy rhyme. (The second verse of “Peace and Love” starts out, “Peace and love ain’t no pose / It’s not just some song you sing at shows,” which might make you question why war and hate always get such a bad rap).

Going Gets Dark brightens when Weiss and Coomes slip into dreamy harmonies, especially on the spaced-out “Beyond the Sky” and the summer-breezy “Poverty Sucks.” Those sweet and fleeting moments hint at Quasi’s potential as a folk act, but for too much of the record, Coomes comes off like a lounge piano player on bad acid. And with lyrics like, “I was a crab dragging claws through the mire / Down below in the murky depths of nowhere” on “Merry X-Mas,” who would ever want to sing along?