Let's Kill Saturday Night

Anyone who heard Robbie Fulks' first two independent albums, Country Love Songs and South Mouth, would doubtless have agreed he deserved wider exposure than he'd received. But while his first (and only) album for Geffen, Let's Kill Saturday Night, is hardly the most egregious example of the Major Label Debut Gone Wrong, at very least it sounds like a large-scale miscalculation that doesn't play to Fulks' strengths. Much of Let's Kill Saturday Night downplays his country influences in favor of a harder, rock-styled approach, but while it's easy to imagine Fulks making a good roots rock album (his work with the Skeletons on his pervious discs point the way), Rick Will's production here is intrusively slick and bombastic most of the time; the crashing guitars and booming drums on "Caroline" and "She Must Think I Like Poetry" have been processed within an inch of their lives and all but drown out the artist's vocals, and the guitar/keyboard arrangement of the title cut turns a charging rocker into a cut-rate Bruce Springsteen parody. Far more surprisingly, some of the his material is not up to his usual standards; "God Isn't Real" is smug and self-satisfied when it means to be bitterly witty, and "Take Me to the Paradise" is a neo-Mark Eitzel character study that ultimately goes nowhere. The shame of it is there are a few cuts on Let's Kill Saturday Night that suggest how good the album could have been in more sympathetic hands; the spare and understated "Night Accident" and "Bethelridge" are both subtle and superb, and "Can't Win for Losing You" is a top-shelf Buck Owens-style twanger. Geffen was swallowed up in a corporate merger shortly after Let's Kill Saturday Night was released, which put paid to the album's commercial prospects and sent Fulks back to the indies, which may have been just as well — it's hardly the sort of calling card Robbie Fulks deserved, and his 2001 album Couples in Trouble proved he had far better ideas of his own about how to direct his rock influences.