Chicago's Bare Mutants found circulation last year in a February batch of HoZac, debuting with a killer 7″ featuring the blown out “Inside My Head”. If the title of the band's full length debut is any indication of the Jered Gummere's battle with Jered Gummere, then things have only gotten worse.
Last year's Bare Mutants gussied up its sound with monstrous, wailin' n' squealin' feedback, intent to push the meters. “Inside My Head” was dangerously glam, but offset by Gummere's social disorders, like glam dosed on dramamine. The return of Bare Mutants is kinda like the evolution of the Velvets, when a young Lou Reed began muscling for that singer-songwriter boyscout badge. The kinship with “Heroin” aside, Bare Mutants' “Crying With Bob” is down and out at the Empty Bottle, one of Chicago's infamous garage rock haunts where a man named Bob stamps hands at the door.
Gummere was brief in his statement regarding “Crying With Bob”, leaving it at, “It's a song about friendship and how Bob rules.” The rest is said in the song itself, “I spend my tired life in your bar / you keep on watching over me / I'll keep watching over you.” It's about friendship, and Bob, and about the comfort of familarity a bar provides, like Gary Portney's “Where Everybody Knows Your Name” left to decay and depravity. If the Empty Bottle still has a jukebox, it owes it to Bob to make room for Bare Mutants.
Bare Mutant's The Affliction is out August 9 on In The Red.
