It’s funny how perceptions change. Several of what have become regarded as the genre-defining records of 1991-93 or thereabouts – including Nevermind, Badmotorfinger, Piece of Cake and Bricks Are Heavy, L7’s first non-underground album – were noted at the time by snobbish rock critics for being somewhat lacking in, um, grunge and instead being more-or-less commercial heavy rock albums. Compared to the frazzled punk of L7’s self-titled 1988 debut or their 1990 Sub Pop album Smell the Magic, Bricks Are Heavy is indeed a relatively polished, even polite piece of work; but it’s also overall a generally better album than either of those was.
Star producer Butch Vig is often given credit for the band’s transformation into something that could conceivably get on the charts, but though his work on the album is indeed magnificent, Jack Endino’s production for Smell the Magic was too. It could even be argued that an Endino version of Bricks Are Heavy – or, for that matter, an Endino version of Nevermind – might have been even better. The fact that remains that, for all of its excellent points and general high quality, the definitive L7 song for those in the know – and a bona fide punk/grunge anthem too – was “Shove,” which appeared on Smell the Magic, and nothing on Bricks Are Heavy is up to quite that standard. As with Nirvana and Nevermind, the real difference was less that L7 and their producer had found a better sound than before, than that the band had sharpened their songwriting skills considerably, delivering an album in which the all-important tunes-to-attitude ratio was far more evenly balanced than it had been previously.
Never fear, Bricks Are Heavy still has enough attitude to fuel dozens of normal rock bands, but at times it is – by L7’s standards at least – an oddly muted affair, partly because Donita Sparks spends a lot more time singing in her deep and somewhat sinister blank voice than she does screaming. See, for instance, the opening, very metallic “Wargasm” – “Wargasm wargasm one two three/ Tie a yellow ribbon round the amputee.” It’s pretty much a classic opening L7 couplet, but up until this album, after the first verse or so Donita would be screaming her lungs out – whereas here she carries on singing in the same surprisingly low-key baleful style throughout the whole song. It sounds really cool and it’s a great song, but in comparison with Smell the Magic it feels like the band is holding back a little bit.
Often, that approach more than pays off – the slower, maniacally groovy tracks like “Scrap” and “Diet Pill” and the heavy ones such as the mighty “Everglade” have a power that the earlier, grunge-oriented L7 would probably have sacrificed for sheer noise and chaos. But here they instead keep an iron grip on the material and the result is songs that are as memorable as they are controlled and brutal, even if they rarely give in to the kind of untrammeled, feedback-laden orgies of sound that they reveled in on the early work.
At the other end of the spectrum, “Pretend We’re Dead” was the band’s big overground pop moment and it still sounds great too, though it’s almost comically ‘90s – not that the band will be complaining when ‘90s nostalgia inevitably takes over movies and Netflix and they start raking in the cash. A kind of cross between R.E.M.’s “Stand” and the Pixies “Levitate Me,” it’s almost too light in comparison with “Scrap” and “Diet Pill” which bookend it, but record labels and radio stations have always loved gateway drugs and in 1992 “Pretend We’re Dead” was the exact kind of state-of-the-art radio-friendly grunge that was edgy enough to please the kids but catchy enough to appease TV. But if you want to hear how good L7 really were at the time, compare the song as it appears on the album with contemporary live versions of it, where the melody and goofiness are respectively enhanced and tempered by the feral energy that the band always exuded but which is only sporadically evident on this likeable, solid-three-star album.
All of which sounds a little grudging. But leaving aside all caveats, Bricks Are Heavy is more than just a grunge-era time capsule and L7 was and is a genuinely great rock band – and some of the songs here, “Everglade” perhaps chief among them, are some of the best the band ever wrote. But they are not all of the best. Newcomers should think of Bricks Are Heavy as the easy way into a great discography, and ultimately fun step on the way to “Some guy just pinched my ass (Shove!)/ Drunken bums ain’t got no class (Shove!)/ The club says I won’t get paid (Shove!)/ It’s been months since I’ve been laid.”
Summary Grunge was mostly punk bands with the rough edges smoothed off and 1992’s Bricks Are Heavy was the first L7 album that MTV would contemplate playing; it’s a strong, slightly compromised rock record but not the whole story. | 70 % Power & polish |
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