Careful Houndy

The prospect that the drummer from Portland, Oregon punk rock goofballs Mean Jeans has made a solo album is probably not going to make many folks giddy with anticipation, especially once they learn it's a synth-heavy project with Jeans Wilder (yep, that's his Mean Jeans stage name) playing all the instruments himself. But the Hound of Love (known to his parents as Andrew Bassett) turns out to be a stronger composer and instrumentalist than most folks would expect, and his solo debut, 2013's Careful Houndy, is satisfying and well-crafted fun. The Hound of Love is a keen student of '80s synthesizer music, and Careful Houndy is full of sounds and patterns that recall the slick side of dance-oriented new wave (best exemplified by a gleaming cover of Bob Dylan's "If Not for You" and the leaner and more Eurocentric "Antarctica"), the electronic percolation of funk acts like Cameo (check out the opener "Action Sequence" for reference), and a place in the Venn diagram where the two sides overlap ("The Ocean Floor" and "Medley II"). While workouts with vintage synths dominate Careful Houndy, Bassett also throws in a few rock & roll numbers he built from the ground up, and "What We Been Told" and "Jerome" are lean but satisfying tunes that split the difference between power pop and first-wave punk, and his synth-driven cover of Paul Collins' "Working Too Hard" manages to have it both ways, rocking with authority despite the lack of guitars and drums. And Bassett is a capable songwriter and vocalist as well as a gifted one-man band. Careful Houndy is a stronger and more inventive piece of work than the Hound of Love has helped create in his Jeans Wilder alter ego, and he'd be well advised to spend more of his spare time with his keyboards; he's every bit as good with them as he is with his drum kit. ~ Mark Deming