Fans of bass-playing punk legend Mike Watt have had to learn to shrug off his idiosyncrasies, starting with the weird lingo he developed during his enduring '80s run with Minutemen and fIREHOSE. Even at his most sincere—and he's never less than sincere—Watt's lyrics need deciphering, with all their dropped "g"s, guttural profanity, and references to "spiels," "jamming econo," and "hellrides." Watt can be musically tricky, too. His open understanding of the punk aesthetic embraces Creedence Clearwater Revival, Blue Öyster Cult, Funkadelic, and Ornette Coleman, along with The Germs and The Voidoids, which makes for a careening sound that can put off the uninitiated.
Watt's third solo album, The Secondman's Middle Stand, is his most jazz-inflected, avant-garde, and impenetrably personal to date. Written in response to a recent life-threatening illness—an abscess in his perineum that left Watt feeling like he had the flu for about a year—the album rumbles through nine interconnected, freeform songs in just under an hour, sounding at times like Spinal Tap's infamous "Jazz Odyssey." Watt utilizes the rarely employed bass-drums-organ rock power-trio format (with bonus background vocals by Petra Haden), and over the top of the atonal racket, he howls lines like "Pile yet another blankie on 'cuz you got a bitter chill in your bones, Watt" and "I've been bassless way too long / Hankerin' bad to strap one on / Jonesin' just to jam out a song."
It's pointless to pretend that The Secondman's Middle Stand will appeal to anyone who's not already aboard the Watt boat, not to mention inclined to find songs titled "Puked To High Heaven" and "Pissbags And Tubing" immediately endearing. But Watt has devotees because he's so down-to-earth, even when he's comparing surgery to Virgil. The album's narrow charm derives from its forensic preoccupations, as Watt documents his body's decay and explores how a year of agony gave him a newfound appreciation for every note he gets to play. The record may not be accessible, but it has more appreciable gravitas than some emo kid whining about how his ex-girlfriend never called him back.