Having Lucas Frazier on a project is the Sad Housekeeping Seal of Approval. His dour lyrical musings and gothic Rock/Americana musical onslaught helped define The Dukes Are Dead as the area’s grimly joyful princes of Hard Rock, and his subsequent band, Pop Goes the Evil, offered a slightly more nuanced and artier yet still immensely powerful version of the same general template.
After the demise of PGTE and a period of intense personal turmoil, Frazier reflected on how to proceed with his musical pursuits, eventually deciding to document a handful of songs he had written by using members of Lemon Sky and keyboardist Justin Swogger. Frazier was pleased with the results but the reality of assembling a dedicated touring version of the quartet that accompanied him in the studio proved to be daunting so he tapped PGTE drummer Jake Grove and formed the wildly versatile and black hole heavy duo Suck the Honey.
Although Frazier hadn’t intended his recent studio output to represent his new musical aggregation, he released the 2016 three-song EP under the Suck the Honey banner, stripped the songs down to their essential elements and he and Grove began translating them and a batch of sparse but highly effective new material in their freshly forged duo format.
In the months after the EP’s release, Frazier and Grove made sporadic but productive visits to the studio to record their debut full length in the actual guitar/drums configuration that had been tearing up local stages. The result of those sessions, All Hail Having Failed, is a visceral howl from the well of Frazier’s soul set to Grove’s slippery heartbeat, alternately as loud as God’s tantrum, as dense as a primeval jungle, as jagged as a broken window and as fragile as a house of cards.
The album’s opener, “Love the Best,” has the reverbed atmospheric quiver of a Chris Isaak weeper for about a minute and half until a quiet feedback squall announces Frazier’s increasingly unhinged vocal and ascending guitar lope, as well as Grove’s appropriate and reliable backbeat. All hell breaks loose as “Love the Best” gives way to “Bite Yr Tongue,” a swaggering breakup anthem punctuated by Frazier’s near-Metal riffage and snarling, bitter recrimination (“I’m never, I’m never coming home/It’s all your fault, you’ll be always be alone… “) and Grove’s Olympian tubthumping, which is immediately followed the profane ’70s Punk fistpump of “They Want Meat,” and the laconic-then-lacerating pulse of “In Love with a Ghost.” In these four songs, collectively and individually, Suck the Honey sets its dynamic range, from Folk-tinted hushed introspection to Hard Rock primal therapy.
That range is explored most fully in “What Makes a Man a Boyfriend,” where Frazier explores the Bermuda triangulated boundaries of his Nick Cave/Johnny Rotten/Dave Vanian dark theatricality, and in the blustering “Will You Bury Me,” Frazier’s duet with the Young Heirloom’s Kelly Fine, where their raw emotional tandem blurt walks the line between defiance and capitulation.
All Hail Having Failed wraps up with the hymnal title track (sounding like Leonard Cohen if he’d been swept up in the CBGB scene) and the epic seven-minute closing track, “Truly Alone and Lonely,” where the ghost of Hank Williams croons and howls about his desolation while his schizophonic grandson accompanies him on acoustic guitar and Ouija board. It is a fitting finish to an album that measures the deepest recesses of the human soul in the throes of post-breakup pain.
Suck the Honey understands the nuances of making this kind of darkness both digestible and appealing without whitewashing its emotion in a cosmetic light, and the duo also knows how to play the living hell out of a song, no matter which end of the sonic spectrum they’re visiting. The latest iteration of Lucas Frazier and Jake Grove may be the best thing either one of them have been involved with in their careers.
SUCK THE HONEY’s free release show is Saturday at MOTR Pub (motrpub.com) with guests Brother O’ Brother. Showtime is 10 p.m. Click here for more album info.
This article appears in Sep 20-27, 2017.