Out There

Boss Hog

White Out

(In the Red Records)

Mr. and Mrs. Jon Spencer turn in their pop sellout to Geffen, only to find the label merged and their band dropped. So much for getting the corporation to subsidize the transition out of the cult’s comfy basement into the family room. But what would Mom and Pop have made of White Out anyway? Probably not much, aside from the would-be single “Stereolight,” which rolls out the snap-crackle-damn only to slow it all down just when the gettin’ gets good; if this isn’t a Ray of Light rip, then Spencer invented the blues after all. Most likely, this disc, like the band’s last (1995’s self-titled platter, otherwise known as Ike and Tina’s Dynamite for really white folks), would have slipped through the cracks and landed in the Nice Price bin faster than a Journey best-of. Turns out that no matter how slick you make your shit, it still sounds like, well, shit.

Used to be, for the brief moment I could stomach Jon Spencer (that is, the brief moment when he wasn’t cutting the same song, the same album, over and over), that was a good thing — greasy rock masquerading as suh-leeeeezy blooze, one man’s art project drenched in enough sex-sweat to melt away the novelty-act artifice. That Spencer couldn’t understand his detractors’ objections — something about a white man in black face — only made his capital-F “art” more admirable. You could hear, buried deep within the corpulent grooves, a man struggling to reconcile his fantasies (he wants to be like Ike) with his fetishes, then shove them all so far up his critics’ bums, they’d be won over by sheer force of will. And it kind of worked, especially on his side project with wife Cristina Martinez (whom he’d fired from Pussy Galore, otherwise known as doing the gal a favor). Boss Hog has always been where Spencer goes when he’s looking for a little nasty fun. He lightens up, writes songs, then gets down and dirty — dirty, meaning you throw on Boss Hog when drunk turns to love.

And there are moments on White Out when the funk-me baby comes out to play: “Chocolate,” with Martinez moaning in the distant background about how her baby’s the man, while Spencer’s up front screaming about “kissin’ and huggin’ and motherfuckin’“; “Jaguar,” which blurs the line between techno and trash-can (Spencer begs his honey: “C’mon, let’s do it”); and the tossed-off thrash-and-bash of closer “Monkey.” But the thrilling edges of 1995 have been worn down, polished to a bar-coded nub. Martinez feels like a bit player now, even as Spencer turns his shit up, blues exploding all over the place…as usual. But this time around, it’s a rather clean mess — which is what happens, perhaps, when you get the Cardigans’ producer to do your dirty work.

Robert Wilonsky