The Austin Lounge Lizards marked their 20th anniversary of making satiric bluegrass music with the release of their eighth record, the aptly titled Never an Adult Moment. After all these years, the Lizards have their shtick down pat, and you either like ’em or you don’t. If you’ve never heard the band, this is as good a place to start as any.
The Lizards’ music is a (usually) entertaining blend of high-brow and low-brow humor that operates on both lyrical and musical levels. They’re never downright nasty, but few targets are immune to their satiric jabs. Typical subjects of their songs are religion, politics, musical excess, and the foibles of the American male. There’s nothing on Never an Adult Moment that rises to quite the level of their best-known numbers, “Jesus Loves Me (But He Can’t Stand You)” and “Gingrich the Newt,” But there are several very clever songs that’ll make you laugh aloud, at least the first few listens.
The album opens strongly with “Grunge Song,” a parody of a modern rock song with alternating quiet and loud sections, complete with a “needlessly repetitive and self-indulgent” solo, on violin no less. The other joke of the song is that the lyrics consist entirely of a description of the song itself: “This is the part of the song that’s really quiet/We play very soft, it sounds like a ballad./And this is the part where we play real hard/It’s much louder than at the beginning.” Thus it skewers “grunge” not only musically but lyrically as well.
“Forty Years Old and I’m Livin’ in My Mom’s Garage” is a quintessential Lizards song, even down to the title that leaves no doubt about the song’s subject: an aging hippy who still hasn’t got a life. “Waitin’ on a Call From Don,” is another staple commentary on everyday life, this one about the tyranny of the auto mechanic.
“Rasputin’s HMO” is a timely but weird take on the public’s current angst over health insurance, complete with a quote from David Seville’s 1958 hit “The Witch Doctor.” Banjo player Tom Pittman gives lines like “are these the gates of Hell or am I in managed care?” perfectly droll treatment with his impressively deep bass voice. Folks who lack the Ivy League education enjoyed by the Lizards’ core members might not get the references to Rasputin, but that hardly matters.
The arcana of Czarist Russia pales beside the twisted subject matter of “The Illusion Travels by Stock Car,” which imagines the making of a movie about race car driver Richard Petty by Spanish surrealist Buñuel.
The high point of Never an Adult Moment is “Big Rio Grande River,” which takes on Tex-Mex ranchera music and Marty Robbins ballads with glee. Nearly every line is rife with musical and lyrical cliche and redundancy, including the soaring chorus: “Big Rio Grande River, it flows down to the sea/Bringing back my memories of the past./High up on Table Mesa, I feel her nearness close to me/As the evening sun sets in the west.”
The album closes on a strong note with “Asheville/Crashville,” which pokes fun at southern small-town boosterism.
There’s some filler here, including the too-long “Hillbillies in a Haunted House,” and the utterly banal “The Beautiful Waitress.”
None of the Austin Lounge Lizards are virtuoso musicians, but they play competent bluegrass and country music that never gets in the way of their humor. Nor are their voices the best in the business, but they’re quite suitable for this kind of light satire. Overall, *Never an Adult Moment* is a breezy and mostly amusing addition to their growing catalog.
(Sugar Hill, 2000)
