Punk Rock bands thrive by reveling in the seedy underground for eternity with raunch and grunge, they find creative inspiration through climbing the ladder of amateur musicianship. They take notes from the cities that raised them and craft sounds that are aimed at defiling and denouncing the system that surrounds them. This is exactly the story for the critically influential yet commercially obsolete band MC5. Started over fifty years ago in Detroit, the band is a predecessor to true punk rock music, forming the bridge between the two genres with the aggressive sound of punk but still touting a slower melody and psychedelic sound of ’60s Rock.
The members themselves lived lives worthy of the punk rock scene. Wayne Kramer, Fred “Sonic” Smith, Rob Tyner, Michael Davis, and Dennis “Machine Gun” Thompson made up the group formed as high school kids searching for any venue to play. After three releases, the band saw what seemed like its final moments. Breaking up due to poor sales, drug abuse, and infighting. This was not a surprising outcome for the band that received plenty of negative labels from mainstream media, and as the years went by, all hope seemed lost. Kramer continued his seedy habits solo, and three members died: Tyner in 1991, Smith in 1994, and Davis in 2012. Now, fifty-two years after their disbanding, the remaining two members have collided to release a final nail in the coffin for MC5.
Released on October 18, 2024 through earMUSIC, Heavy Lifting is the band’s final release. A completely posthumous release… the album was created and produced prior to Kramer’s passing in February and Thompson’s in May of 2024. With that said, Heavy Lifting is a forty-five-minute jam session of funky Alt-Rock guitar and rambunctious lyrics. It is missing the dueling guitar of Smith to complement Kramer, and the Rock-n-Roll sound is much more prevalent than it was for the budding artists in the early ’70s, but the music is still exciting with powerful solos and energetic basslines to drive each song.
What is missing from the original releases was lost to time and sobriety, but what can be expected for a band at two-fifths of its original roster aged by fifty years of life? Features and collaborations with other musicians in the scene fill in the gaps in the sound. Pieced together by Producer Bob Ezrin (Kiss’s Destroyer, Pink Floyd’s The Wall), there is sound from Rage Against the Machine’s Tom Morello, Living Color’s founding Guitarist Vernon Reid, Alice In Chains Vocalist William Duvall, Brad Brooks, and Slash. A star-studded list of features that give each song a unique sound and aura. Overall, the sound is closest to their original 1969 album, Kick Out The Jams, in comparison to the other two MC5 releases before disbanding.
The album starts with its title track, which is a fast-paced introduction to the new sound of MC5. It features an Alt-Rock Punk baseline with some eerie vocals that get deconstructed by drums, all leading up to a Heavy Metal guitar and voice. Kramer is a confident and powerful vocalist for the entirety of the album and helps to push the punk envelope in an otherwise funky Rock-n-Roll release. The mix of these genres is done well, especially in the tracks that feature interludes or solos, which allow a specific sound or instrument to take center stage before being enveloped in the greater noise of the song. The music is sonically interesting because it is layered; the drums feel like a harmony of different instruments, and the guitar climbs through the music in staccato bursts that give way to smooth, funky curves.
“Because of Your Car” is a good example of a well-mixed song that swells and slows appropriately. There is plenty of powerful energy and suspense, but this is achieved through the smooth bassline that counteracts the high-pitched vocals instead of intense, fast-paced singing or dredging guitar chords. What’s even better is that a funky guitar chord ends each verse and adds a unique and elongating energy to the song.
In enough words, Heavy Lifting is mostly a Rock-n-Roll release, but there are a few Punk Rock establishments in the mix. “Black Boots” and “Blind Eye” express the anti-authoritarian roots of the band. The sound is a little choppier, and the storytelling is focused on anger rather than smoothness. The songs are thematically out of place compared to the sexy and raunchy nostalgia of the rest of the album, but the sound of each connects the songs to their release. “Black Boots” could be its own cornerstone of an entirely different album. MC5’s storytelling is always powerful; inspired by their political poetry of the ’70s, they have once again released a song that takes aim at attacking the current American political system. It is charged with powerful emotion but can still blend in with the rest of the album, which is seeping with attitude anyway. This rocker attitude can be seen in “I Am the Fun (The Phoney)” and “Blind Eye,” which have a fun chorus and powerful drums that push through their entirety.
Although it is fifty-two years after they ultimately fell apart, with music that feels a little dated and a dead roster, the posthumous release of Heavy Lifting by MC5 is an energetic release from the early Proto-Punk influencers of the late ’60s and early ’70s. The album is a beautiful final step for the band, a last chapter that encapsulates their early sound and collaborates with the Rock-n-Roll music that they helped build. Partially missing the destructive world that built them, MC5 has made up for it with funky guitar and classically Rock lyrics. For this reason, Cryptic Rock gives MC5’s Heavy Lifting 3.5 out of 5 stars.
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