3 out of 5

Label: Skin Graft Records

Produced by: Steve Albini

A blistering, but maybe also a little tiring, half-hour set of heavy, punky blues rock.

Mount Shasta were one of those groups that kind of built the pillars of the Skin Graft sound for me, sitting between more experimental efforts like U.S. Maple, and the hardcore heft of Dazzling Killmen – Shasta just rocked, but did it very oddly and abrasively, in a way that totally felt in line with SG’s no-wave stylings.

Watch Out always seems like it’s going to be my favorite Shasta record, as it passes the recording reigns over to Steve Albini – certainly suited to this kind of loud, brawling form of rock ‘n’ roll – and kicks off with Lil’ Hoss, one of the group’s best songs, uniting their musical thunder with their eccentricities – the wild guitar squiggles actually bring to mind Arab on Radar, or Brainiac – in a wholly cohesive way. This synergy does happen a couple more times on the record (particularly on penultimate instrumental It Has Wings), but the relative polish of the disc, whether via Steve’s shaping or the group just having been together for a few years, strips away an element of rawness that made the preceding Who’s the Hottie such a standout. John Forbes’ somewhat tossed-off lyrics work when everything is all bluster, but with a lot of Watch Out playing in a sort of comfortable mid-range, his singing and words don’t add enough to the sound to make any track’s rants cause you to crack a smile, or want to sing along. The music definitely keeps hitting hard (and crisply, with the production), but, as mentioned, there’s a limitation with the range and pace that allows the middle of the disc to start blending together, and the slower songs almost completely get lost.

This sounds super negative, but it’s more that Mount Shasta just got way too good at what they were doing to effect the same kind of sloppiness that worked before. So Watch Out is actually a dang good rock record, weird and grinding as anything else… but also hitting some of the same notes on repeat, and never quite topping, on the whole, that which came before.