W.H. WALKER - duds!

If Ty Segall and Tim Presley’s White Fence are our era’s New York Dolls and Velvets, then Portland’s Welcome Home Walker could easily be our Brownsville Station: comparatively clean but subversively hip Americana about girls, parties, and, um… taking baths (see how clean this is?), too raw to be the Georgia Satellites but too aw-shucks to be garage. Singer and guitarist Devin Clark’s voice (which stayed too far in the background during his stint in the far more Dolls-like Soda Pop Kids), had the kind of hoarse adrenaline-fueled Mark Arm delivery that announces itself as a party from the get-go, and that, combined with his raw guitar riffs, might obscure the fact that some of these lyrics are damned clever. Besides the aforementioned bath opus “Suds” (which is exactly what it sounds like—perhaps the best rock song about bathing since “Splish Splash”), I can’t get enough of “It’s Not Enough,” a Costello-ey almost-ballad about women who “pull away like you never needed anything/but Choo Choo, you know you got all of your steam from me.” And perhaps my favorite is “Listen Up, Mac,” secretly advice to a girl whose chemical consumption is making her too skeletal to be sexy: “Uh uh, String Bean, just keep your nose clean.” Diction isn’t exactly Clark’s goal with the vocals—luckily the awesome vinyl package comes with lyrics and hand-detailed chunks of other albums pasted on! Who knows, your copy might have Michael Jackson and the Ninja Turtles. -Dan Collins - L.A. RECORD