4 out of 5

Label: What Are Records?

Produced by: Rob Kleiner

There’s so much going on on Tub Ring’s A Choice of Catastrophes that it’s somewhat inevitable that the group would lose control over the course of its 13 tracks. Only… that’s not really what happens; the album is rather miraculously controlled in its sprawling wackiness, it’s just that the appeal of that starts to wane, allowing the last few selections on the disc to not delight as much as they could.

Post the more direct Mr. Bungle influences of their first major release, The Drake Equation – and even by that point, honestly – Tub Ring’s sound has always embraced elements way beyond the scope of the spazzy hardcore circles their Bungle and Mindless Self Indulgence connections suggested. Reliably kicking out albums every few years, this embrace kept maturing, smoothing out the edges between shouty moments and more cinematic ones, and proving capable of absorbing pop culture oddities into their milieu and making them wholly their own.

The music world was changing shape, though, and youthful energy found distractions elsewhere; albums became slightly less regular, and a bit more broad: 2010’s Secret Handshakes‘ fairly straight-ahead rock was still notably Tub Ring, but very digestibly so. Several years and remixes / compilations later brings A Choice of Catastrophes, a 2017 album which isn’t not a step in the same direction as Handshakes, but it’s also an album that shows off Rob Kleiner’s intervening years working abroad in the industry as a producer, writer, and performer, and manages to absorb in the very-online and fast-evolving nature of that industry, subsuming and Tub Ring-ing music trends track by track. In lesser hands, the pseudo hip-hop of Without You or the grimey groove of Proper Funds would be cringe; but TR give it edge, and twist the beats into very familiar polka-adjacent bops with Kevin Gibson’s soaring vocals adding always-rewarding emotion. Elsewhere, Polyphonic Spree and J.G. Thirlwell rear their heads, alongside an inside-out cover of a Ghost song – turning Secular Haze’s bombast into something intimate – and though it’s amidst lesser tracks on the album, a surprisingly sad and moody rendition of Michael Jackson’s Remember the Time reminds us how weird Tub Ring actually is, and how skilled they are at turning that weirdness into pop jams.

As mentioned, though, the vibe that we’re reaching for something new each track (with some reliable Tub Ring punk moments interspersed) lends to some tedium after the midway point. The latter half of the album is technically very sharp, and reaches for an interesting cover of an old Italian song, but we’re faced with one of those heavy-quotation “problems” where the first part of an album is truly so perfect that what follows must pale in comparison. In this case, that’s compounded by how varied the music is, encouraging the group to be slightly less varied as things go on. As a positive, I do think that’s responsible for how well the disc ends up hanging together, but all the same, the later tracks are sleepers – the more I listen, the more I appreciate how they’re solid TR rockers, they just have a hard time standing out after a slew of hook-heavy bangers.

A super impressive return that you’d never guess was preceded by a seven year gap.